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GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 



Goose -Quill Papers. 



BY 



LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 






r&"2>' 



^te 



BOSTON: 
ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1885. 






Copyright, 1885, 
By Louise Imogen Guiney. 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



TO 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 
THE LOVING HOMAGE 

OF 

is 33ooL 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

On the Good Repute of the Apple .... 9 

A Hand 16 

An Open Letter to the Moon 28 

Brentford Pulpit 39 

Notes made by Troilus Gently 56 

On Teaching One's Grandmother how to 

Suck Eggs 74 

Old Haunts . ^ ... 82 

Free Thoughts on Books ... ... 89 

A November Eestival .... ... 98 

Vagabondiana 104 

Mathematics . 113 

A Child in Camp 117 

On Graveyards 130 

» Some Garden-Eolk 138 

Hospitalities 141 

The Two Voices 148 

Sweetheart 156 

On the Beauty of Idleness . 161 

De Mosquitone 166 

On the Garret 172 




GOOSE-QUILL PAPEKS. 



ON THE GOOD REPUTE OE THE APPLE, 




OR the sake of an apple Atalanta lost 
her nigh-won victory; and that other 
apple, thrown for the fairest, moved all 
Olympus into discord. Bragi, the north-god, and 
his peers renewed their youth with one touch of 
its cool juices. Dragons circled it in the en- 
chanted garden ; " the daughters three " stood # 
about it in a sacred ring, and none but Hercu- 
les was its captor. The renascent marbles of the 
Greeks are dug out of earth, — " Praxitelean 
shapes ! " — with its rounded beauty yet in their 
outstretched hands. What a superb mythologic 
pedigree ! What noble mention (each worth an 



10 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

immortality) from old poets, romancers, histori- 
ans ! All heterodoxy lauded thee, apple of mine 
eye. It was reserved for true-church traditions 
to belie thee. 

Thou who art full of virtue, what is this 
rumor of thy defection in Eden, thy remote 
causing of all contemporaneous woe ? Thou 
who art fair without as a cherub's cheek, how 
couldst thou be abettor to the treacherous spirit ? 
Shall the fault of our frail ancestress rest upon 
thy rosy head ? " That the forbidden fruit of 
Paradise was an apple," saith a grave and learned 
author, " is commonly believed, confirmed by tra- 
dition, perpetuated by writings, verses, pictures ; 
and some are so bad prosodians as thence to 
derive the Latin word malum, because that fruit 
♦was the first occasion of evil : wherein, notwith- 
standing determinations are presumptuous, many, 
I perceive, are of another belief. " Let the per- 
sonal argument stand, in default of a bolder plea. 
Mephisto, who hath had no chance of reforma- 
tion, and who may be supposed to keep his early 
leanings, is in modern times no frequenter of 



ON TEE GOOD REPUTE OF THE APPLE. 11 

orchards. Not by farmer, nor wayside knight, nor 
loitering sweethearts at dusk, hath he ever been 
detected prowling about an innocent apple-tree. 

It hath, on the other hand, been affirmed by 
an ingenious clerk, that apple-eating is a mascu- 
line passion, and that no woman hath a domi- 
nating natural relish for this hearty fruit ; which, 
proven, would seem to indicate (as a burnt child 
dreads the fire, according to the proverb) that 
Eve's mindful daughters shun by instinct the 
immemorial enemy. If, indeed, it needs must be 
demonstrated by some unborn logician, that our 
primal happiness was forfeited by nought else, 
beyond the serpent's wiles, than a Gilliflower or 
a Greening, hanging on the representative tree, 
and criterion of obedience, — then there exist 
myriads of her descendants with the ancestral 
weakness, who shall look on our abused common 
mother with new and tender consideration, such 
as her disastrous connection with a plum, or a 
currant, or a quince, could never have evoked. 

The apple is the only fruit which deserveth the 
name of genial. A peach is but a Capuan dish ; 



12 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

the lime approacheth with cold infrequency ; the 
amiable pear hath too little character ; the grape 
is chiefly suggestive, anticipatory of its hereafter, 
as the larva of the gorgeous butterfly. But 
Apple standeth on her own merits. Tart, jelly, 
fritters, dumpling, enter not into the imagination 
of her possessor. Nay, nor even cider, that fret- 
ful disempurpled wine, — wine, as it were, with 
the bar sinister. Apple hath not the flippant 
gayety of the cherry ; her glad humor is some- 
what dashed with cynicism : she warmeth the 
heart, and trippeth up the tongue, and is, in 
the accepted phrase of artists, " a good fellow ; " 
foe to unrighteous melancholy, as Laurentius 
writ, and frankly compassionate. She should 
have had Horace for her court-poet. One can 
conceive of poor, manly Fielding loving her at 
the modest ratio of three dozen a day; and of 
little Mr. Pope brushing her aside with fastidious 
petulance. 

The friends of Apple, your sworn familiars, 
who offend not her sun-mottled exterior with 
barbaric divisions of the knife, may be known 



ON TEE GOOD REPUTE OF THE APPLE. 13 

by their ready wit and their bright glances. 
Hath not the wholesome autumn light, which 
filtered into the fruit they affect, permeated their 
moral temperament ? They must needs be sound, 
consolatory, humane, and fit to wrestle with 
every wind that blows. " Man is that he eats/' 
we read among the bewilderments of German 
speculation. But of her chaste and subtle cup, 
rimmed with gold or crimson, as Nature willed, 
the elect drink invigoration. 

" Encompass me about with apples," saith the 
Canticle, " for I am sick with love ; " which, 
driven to its bare and literal sense, implies that 
apples are antidotes to languor and over-fond- 
ness. Apple, be it said, is a Platonist. 

Bake her not. Take her in her gypsy wild- 
ness, in the homespun, lovelier so than pome- 
granates in their velvet : not too untimely, either, 
lest she be vindictive, and become the apotheca- 
ry's friend rather than thine. Learn to trace her 
maiden growth among her cheery sisters, from 
some gnarled seat. Deny her not the arm-chair 
with thee before the flickering hearth- fire ; and in 
thy most solitary meditations, thy rapt brooding- 



14 GOOSE- QUILL PAPERS. 

hours, trust her that she shall not distract thee. 
Out of celestial gardens, in the tender Cappa- 
docian legend, maid Dorothy's angel brought 
apples to Theophilus ; to him, indeed, the fruit of 
salvation. Yet, having lost the sweet symbolic 
grace of yore, she comes ever benignly, and with- 
out malice. Lavish October's legacy, foretelling 
to thy fancy other seasons yet to make glad the 
earth, she, more than any other, is the staunch 
stand-by, the winter friend. Her native orchards 
droop lifelessly in snows; but, like a fair deed, 
she surviveth mortality, a kind and vital influence 
still. Darling of the tourist and the huntsman 
that she is, never was there creature so abso- 
lutely adapted to the student. Her happy 
moisture fructifieth the brain. 

Only our neighboring Concord sages, far back 
in the Athenian beginnings of the present school, 
sought her intellectual aid in vain. They, and 
the listening element, met for conversation, — 
Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Curtis, even Haw- 
thorne, with his sylvan shyness about him. There 
were appalling breaks, pertinacious " flashes of 
silence/' such as were indigenous to Macaulay. 



ON THU GOOD REPUTE OF THE APPLE. 15 

The philosophers sat erect, and struggled; then 
the narrator tells us how, with Olympic sweet- 
ness, the host, Ealph Waldo Emerson, brought 
out a dish of russets, — magna spes altera, 
genius having failed, — which were consumed, 
unavailingly, in silence. The ally was wistfully 
courted on after occasions ; but the club solemnly 
dispersed on the third night. 

If Apple, alas ! hath her freaks, let them be 
expended on philosophers. For her humbler 
adherents, she hath too constant a good-will. 
To us, at least, she is faithful, recompensing our 
old affection for every branch of her house. We 
are no specialist, but cherish her to the twenti- 
eth remove : all her pale and soured graftings, 
her pungent windfalls, her eccentric hangers-on, 
her disregarded poor relations. 

Yea, till our judgment and our gallantry for- 
sake us, be thou our deity, Pomona ! 

" Candles we '11 give to thee, 
And a new altar." 

Nothing shall divert our vow. Wilfully and 
in cold blood, we subscribe ourself thy pagan. 



A HAND. 




T would be a judicious pastime for 
some curious scholar to write up the 
antecedents and traditions of these ten 
ubiquitous digits with which Nature dowers 
most of us; a survey reaching from the crime 
that darkened the morning of the world — the 
handiwork of Cain — to the most delicate out- 
come of art, finished yesterday ; a summary of 
all the vicissitudes and symbolisms connected 
with the hand and its doings; challenges, in- 
vestitures, perjuries, salutations ; the science of 
chiromancy that the Romans loved ; records 
made by chisel or pen by Michael Angelo, 
Goethe, Palestrina ; of gloves and rings and 
falcon-jesses; of armor buckled on by saddened 
sweethearts, and prizes bestowed at tourneys ; of 



A HAND. 17 



power in the soldier, and persuasiveness in the 
fair lady; of Eastern juggling, and missal illu- 
minations in gray cells, and manuscripts folded 
and preserved through centuries ; of " pickers 
and stealers " and money-getting associations, 
seizures, bestowals, and benedictions. The Dutch 
boy, stopping the dyke with his frozen thumb 
in times of flood, shall not be forgotten; nor 
that maid of honor who, with her slender wrist, 
bolted the door against the raging mob of revo- 
lutionists, undauntedly long, and at last vainly; 
and in the chapter of heroisms shall be found 
the patient pyramid-builders, and Mucius Scse- 
vola, unflinching in fire ; how with his hand 
Attila made kings tremble, Xerxes scourged 
the sea, and the saint of old Assisi won bird 
and beast from solitude, to feed and be ca- 
ressed. We bethink us lastly of antique instru- 
ments, old tapestries, intaglios, and rare lamps; 
of the child Christopher Wren, raising card- 
houses and forecasting the stone glories of Lon- 
don; or of Petrarch, roving in a dusty world 
of books, and so dying, suddenly and with- 

2 



18 GOOSE-QUILL PJPERS. 

out paiiij with his arm about them, as of things 
among those which our historian shall touch. 

Scarce any author, save Sir Thomas Browne, 
hath thought it worth while to spend learned 
discussion on the right and the left hand. 
Yet it is a peculiar schism we graft on a young- 
ling's mind when we teach it to discard the 
o*ood service and ready offices of its honest sin- 
istral member ; so that we may come to look 
upon a left-handed neighbor as a sort of natural 
protest against an ill custom, and a vindication 
of unjustly suppressed forces. 

A hand clinched, a hand outstretched, have 
in them all of defiance and supplication ; hospi- 
tality shines in a hand proffered, — fC a frank 
hand/' as the Moor saitli. Like a shell turned 
from the light, but with the tints of the morning 
not yet faded from it, is a babe's hand, rr tip- 
tilted/' lovely, as if it should close on nothing 
ruder than a flower. The bronzed hands of toil, 
the opaque hands of idleness, differing even as 
life and death, the dear, remembered, cordial 
hands of one's youth, — shall they not have 



A HAND. 19 



their laureate also in the commentator that is 
to be, this new philosopher in trifles, this stu- 
dent of the furthest and subtlest bodily activi- 
ties, and choronicler, as it were, in extremis ? 

The hand betrays the heart; not to thee, ob- 
streperous gypsy ! with thy sapient life-lines, 
but even to the unchrismed eye of the laity. 
We detect good-nature in yon plump matron, 
because of that pudgy but roseate part of her 
appended to her Tuscan bracelet; good-nature 
and generosity and simple faith. We have close 
acquaintance with courageous hands, melancholy 
hands, avaricious hands, compassionate hands, fas- 
tidious hands, hands sensitive and fair, friends 
to all things gentle, and pulsing with intelli- 
gence. We read in this hand how it hath 
healed a bitter wound ; and in that, how it hath 
locked the door against a cry. Have we not 
known hands dark and shrunken with age or 
suffering, instinct yet with so-called patrician 
blood ? The memory comes over us of the prince 
(such was verily his meek title) from a far isle, 
the inscrutable Asiatic, acclimated in speech and 



20 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

dress, whose chilling touch, recalling icicles in 
midsummer, we superstitiously evaded at meet- 
ing and parting, and over #hose origin we sun- 
lovers made jests, in the halls of that dreaming 
heir of a later dynasty, Madame B. 

It was the boast of Job that he had not kissed 
his hand in sign of worship to sun nor moon 
nor stars. Note the pertinent and noble met- 
aphor of Banquo, to express reliance and rest 
in time of perplexity : — 

" In the great hand of God I stand." 

To what fopperies, what wild freaks of medi- 
aeval years, hath the pliant hand lent itself! 
to the triangles, stars, portraits of ancient cali- 
graphic cunning; to the wig, shape facetious, 
embodying a request to the barber, or the heart, 
dolphin, and true-love knot, that revealed a 
swain's metrical sighs to the scrutinizing eyes 
of Phyllis. Peace to those old minimizers ! 
to him, the spider-worker, whose elfin Iliad 
Cicero saw, packed miraculously in a nut- 
shell; to sturdy Peter Bales, "that did so take 



A HAND. 21 



Eliza " with his infinitesimal tracery, which the 
lion-queen delighted to read through a mighty 
glass, holding his airy volume on her thumb- 
nail ! 

Disraeli the elder tells us of the pleasing ori- 
gin of that modern phrase, — " to write like 
an angel ;" gracefully derived from one Angelo 
Vergecio, a scribe who drifted to Paris under 
Francis L, and whose name became in time a 
synonyme for beautiful caligraphy. To write like 
an angel ! Now, with due allowance of the 
possession, among celestial beings, of our poor 
terrene accomplishments, yet may angels them- 
selves most solemnly and securely preserve us 
from the foregoing solecism ! Saving the pri- 
mordial Angelo, a legend incorporated, none do 
so much write like angels as that slave-trader, 
the writing-master, enemy and subjugator of 
the hand's natural freedom. Handwriting, that 
should be matter of separate mental habit and 
muscular action, as Hartley Coleridge averred, 
the writing-master artificializes into a set form : 
a young lady is to write so ; a clerk, so. There 



22 GOOSE-QTJILL PAPERS. 

is a rascally supposed respectability in keeping 
to this masquerade, where revelations of individ- 
uality are never in order. Spectre of our child- 
hood, bugbear -of ambrosial years, tyrant, nay, 
what can we call thee worse than thou art 
in bare English, Copy-book ! the faithfullest 
vow of our life, religious as Hannibal's, was 
against thee. We recall with unalterable haugh- 
tiness, that not for one moment did we tolerate 
thee, save under burning protest ; that thy long- 
drawn da capo moralities, all letter and no spirit, 
made our soul shudder; that every hour at the 
desk of old, under thy correct, staring eye, was 
an hour of scorn and insurrection; and that we 
celebrate daily thine anniversary and thy festival, 
after our own heart, in cherishing every irregu- 
larity that thy Puritan code abhorreth. Aye, 
tails and quirks are dear to us, and we fear 
not to send forth our t without his bar, our i 
without her dot, lest we should seem reconciled 
to thine atrocious ritual. We shake our en- 
franchised hand in thy face, thou stereotyped 
impostor ! 



A HAND. 23 



We are not of misanthropic habit, but we 
reserve a sentiment warm as York's against Lan- 
caster, or a right Carlist's towards the mild 
usurping race of Spain, for that fellow-mortal 
whose traceries in ink and pencil are sealed with 
orthodoxy. By the accepted wretchedness of 
their capitals, the moral depravity of their loop- 
letters, we choose our friends, — the least erring 
the least dear. We cannot abide Giotto, because 
of his 0, that had no blemish. We take solace 
and delight in that exquisite Janus-jest of the 
last Bourbon Louis, who, re-entering his palace, 
the Imperial initial everywhere above and beside 
him, said, with a light shudder, to one of his 
blood, " Voila des ennemis autour de nous ! iy 
Not for all the authority of divine Prudence 
herself, shall we be mindful of our P's and Q's. 
A flourish — not, indeed, the martial blare of 
trumpets, but the misguided capers of a pen- 
point — we look upon as a cardinal, yea (if we 
may proportion adjectives to our grade of feel- 
ing), a pontifical sin. 

Character demonstrates itself in trifles. Wash- 



24 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

ington wrote with clearness and deliberation, like 
a law-maker ; Eufus Choate, intricately and whim- 
sically, like a wit. Oldys runs down the list 
of English royal autographs, drawing no infer- 
ences, and set solely on his fact. Cromwell's 
signature is paradoxically faint and vacillating. 
" Elizabeth writ an upright hand, — a large, 
tall character; James I., in an ungainly fash- 
ion, all awry ; Charles I., an Italian hand, the 
most correct of any prince we ever had ; Charles 
II., a little, fair, running, uneasy hand/' such, 
adds a commentator, as we might expect from 
that illustrious vagabond, who had much to 
write, often in odd situations, and never could 
get rid of his natural restlessness and vivacity. 
It goes somewhat hard with us that Porson, 
Young, and especially Thackeray, wielded a 
proper quill, and were prone to consider pen- 
manship as one of the fine arts. Nevertheless, 
we take it that Mr. Joseph Surface, in the com- 
edy, would write so as to gladden the " herte's 
roote " of a school-mistress ; as, likewise, might 
our honest friend Iago. Item, that Homer's 



A HAND. 25 



mark was but a hen-scratch, outdone, in his 
own day, by the most time- out- of -mind stroller 
that sang, eyeless, with him. 

No missionary, fretting over the innocent ras- 
calities of Afric tribes, burns with holier wrath 
than seizes us on beholding the prospectus of 
the "Penman's Gazette/' Hark to its beguil- 
ing philippics : "Good penmanship hath made 
fortunes; every year thousands are advanced by 
it to position and liberal salaries ; students make 
it a specialty. It is worth more than all the 
Greek and Latin, the antiqiiatecl rubbish of the 
higher schools and colleges, for, ('thine exqui- 
site reason, dear knight ? ') — for it yields prompt 
and generous returns in money, food, clothing, 
good associations, and incentives to usefulness in 
the world ! " The gentle reader is to imagine 
money in huge capitals, and the other rewards 
of merit dwindling successively, till the incen- 
tives to usefulness are scarce visible to the 
naked eye. And then, forsooth, one is encour- 
aged periodically by the fish-like portraits of 
Famous Penmen ! Have a care, have a care, 



26 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

little guileless abecedarian, lest thy physiogno- 
my, some black morning, should lend its beauty 
to the procession of fiends who "Write Like 
Angels ! 

"Whom shall we hire to shout from the house- 
tops, vehemently, and with Quixotic disinterest- 
edness, that success should be won through 
ambitions a trifle exclusive of money, food, and 
clothing ; and that this " new heraldry of hands, 
not hearts," is a monstrous error? Who is 
there to heed that strange doctrine ? Think 
into what grave parley we might be drawn, even 
by the silken string of the " Penman's Gazette ; " 
into what resentment of an unheavenly lesson ! 
But we forbear. 

A century closes at the finger-tips of two men 
of unequal age, and every touch of palm to 
palm forges a link of the unseen social chain 
which connects us with the father of our race. 
We take in ours, with enthusiastic consciousness, 
a hand we honor, or a hand that by represen- 
tation has, perhaps, held cordially that of " the 
great of old." So chance we to strike, across 



A HAND. 27 



the gulf of time, into the grasp of Caedmon, 
the Saxon beginner, or the real Roland of the 
horn, or Plato, or Alcuin, or him of Salzburg, 
the sunniest-hearted maker of music. Neither 
in our speculations can we forget that a Hand 
not all of earth rested once upon childish heads 
in Galilee, and passed among vast crowds, for- 
giving, healing, and doing good; and we know 
not but that our meanest brother, coming as a 
stranger, may bring to us, in more ways than 
one, its transmitted benediction. 




AN OPEN LETTEB TO THE MOON. 

" To the Celestial and my Soul's Idol, the 
Most Beautified : " — 




T might appear to us an imperative, 
though agreeable duty, most high and 
serene Madame, to waft towards you, 
occasionally, a transcript of our humble doings 
on this nether planet, were we not sure, in the 
matter of friendly understanding, that we opened 
correspondence long ago. You were one of our 
earliest familiars. You stood in that same office 
to our fathers and mothers, back to your some- 
time contemporary, Adam of the Garden ; and 
while we are worried into acquiescence with years, 
cares, wrinkles, and such inevitable designs of 
age, we are more pleased than envious to dis- 
cover that you grow never old to the outward 



AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON. 29 

eye, and that you appear the same "lovesoine 
ladie bright/' as when we first stared at you 
from a child's pillow. You are acquainted, not 
by hearsay, but by actual evidence, with our 
family history, having seen what sprt of figure 
our ancestors cut, and being infinitely better 
aware of the peculiarities of the genealogical 
shrub than we can ever be. Therefore we make 
no reference to a matter so devoid of novelty. 
But we do mean to frankly free our mind on 
the subject of your Ladyship's own behavior. 
"We take this resolve to be no breach of that 
exalted courtesy which befits us, no less than 
you, in your skyward station. 

We have, in part, lost our ancient respect foi 
you, — a sorry fact to chronicle. There were 
once various statements floating about our cra- 
dle, complimentary to your supposed virtues. 
You were Phoebe, twin to Phoebus, " goddess 
excellently bright ; " a queen, having a separate 
establishment, coming into a deserted court by 
night, and kindling it into more than daytime 
revelry. You were an enchantress, the tutelary 



so 

divinity of water-sprites and greensward fairies, 
lour presence was indispensable for felicitous 

dreams. To be moon-struck, then, meant to be 
charmed inexpressibly, — to be lifted oil' our 
feet ^ 

Now, we allow that you may have suffered 
by misrepresentation, or else are we right in 
detecting your arts ; for, bv all your starry 
handmaidens, you are not what we took you to 

be. We are informed (our quondam faith in you 
almost beshrews the day we learned to read!) 
that you are a timid dependent only of the sun, 
afraid to show yourself while he is on his p 
grinations ; thai you slyly steal the garb of his 
splendor as he lays it aside, and blaze forthwith 
in your borrowed finery. 

You are no friend to innocent goblins, but 
abettor to house-breakers. You are conspirator 
in manv direful deeds, attending base nocturnal 

ft v 

councils, and tacitly arraigning yourself against 
the law. "Let us be Diana's foresterSj gentle- 
men of the shade, . . . governed, as the sea is, 
by our noble and chaste mistress, the moon. 



,(N 0/7.W LETTER TO THE MOON. 81 

under whose countenance we — steal." Was it 
nol well said, no1 frankly ? 

Your gossip is the ominous owl, and not Titania. 

Your inconstancy^ to come on delicate ground; 

shineth above your other characteristics. Since 

we have seen your color come and go, we sur- 
mise there is no dearth of intrigue and repartee 
up there; and being, moreover, well acquainted 
with the texture o( your red and your gray veil, 
we infer that you masquerade periodically at 
very unseasonable hours. Of painting your com- 
plexion we are disposed io acquit you; yet it 
is a severe blow to us io learn from the most 
trustworthy sources, that you wax. 

Selene, Artemis ! you are worldly beyond 
worldlings. We hear that you have quarters, 
and that you jingle them triumphantly in the 
ears of Orion, who is nobody but a poor hunter. 
Beware o( the exasperation of the lower classes ! 
whose awakening is what we call below, a 
French Revolution. 

Who, indeed, that hath a mote in his eye, 
cannot still discern a huge beam in yours ? 



32 SB- KX 

You are in grievous need o( a resident mission- 
ary, considering' that you persist in obstinate 
schisms, and flaunt that exploded Orientalism, the 
Crescent, in the face and eyes of Christendom. 

You are much more distant and reserved, O 
beguiler ! than you pretend. Your temper is 
said to be volcanic. 

You that were Diana ! who is this Falstaf- 
fian, Toby IVlehian, Kriss Kringlish person we 
see about your premises? lie hangeth his 
great, ruddy, comfortable phiz out of your ease- 
ments, and holdeth it sidewise with a wink or 
a leer. AYe look on him as an officious rascal. 
Tie peereth where you only, by privilege, have 
permission to enter, lie hath the evil eye. lie 
thirtieth himself a proper substitute for you, 
and King of the Ulumiuari ; he reprodueeth your 
smile, and seattereth your largesses; he maketh 
faces — we say it shudderingly — at your wor- 
shippers below. frequently hath he appropri- 
ated kisses that were blown to you personally, 
or consigned to you for delivery from one sweet- 
heart to another. 



AN OPEN LETTER TO THE 310 ON 33 

Lady, Light-dispenser ! think, we hereby 
beseech you, of the danger of his being taken 
for you ! Picture the discomfiture of your min- 
strel, who, intoning a rapturous recital of your 
charms, and casting about for a sight of your 
delectable loveliness, is confronted instead with 
that broad, ingenuous vagabond ! In some such 
despairing rage as the minstrel's must have been 
the inventor of the German tongue, who dis- 
carded all other chances of observation after 
once beholding this thing ycleped your Man, 
and angrily insisted on " Der Mond w — the 
Moon, he — as the proper mode of speech. 

Get you straightway a more acceptable min- 
ion, one of more chivalric habit, of more spare 
and ascetic exterior. Your credit and our com- 
fort demand it. " Pray you, remember/' 

Less know we of your interminable starry 
neighbors. Is Mars civil, or heavy Saturn capa- 
ble of laughter? Hath a comet vexed you, — 
that tireless incendiary? Doth Leo roar too 
loudly on your sensitive ear? We fancy that 
the Dipper is replenished frequently in your 

3 



34 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

Ladyship's court ; that the Milky Way is pleas- 
antest of your pastures ; that the Scorpion guard- 
eth your palace gateway ; and that Aquarius, be 
he not delinquent, tendeth your flower-beds. 

"What scenes, Cosmopolite, Circumnavigator, 
Universalist, have you beheld ! What joy, 
what plenty ; what riot and desolation ! You 
are the arch-spectator. Death sees not half so 
widely. He iurketh like an anxious thief in 
the crowd, seeking what he may take away. But 
your bland leisurely eye looketh down impar- 
tially on all. 

Caravans rested a thousand years ago beneath 
you in the desert; Assyrian shepherds chanted 
to you with their long-hushed voices; the Eu- 
phrates, while the infant world fell into its first 
slumber, leaped up and played with you in 
Paradise. You have known the chaos before 
man, and yet we saw you laugh upon last April's 
rain. Are there none for whom you are lonely 
through the ages ? Are there not centuries of 
old delight in your memory, unequalled now? 
faces fairer than the lilies, on whose repose you 



AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON. 35 

still yearn to shine? Do you miss the smoke 
of altars ? Have you forgotten the beginners of 
the " star-ypointing pyramid"? Can you not 
tell us a tale of the Visigoth ? How sang Blon- 
del against the prison-door? How brawny was 
Bajazet ? How fair was Helen ; Semiramis how 
cruel ? Moon ! where be the treasures of the 
doughty Kidd? 

Where, too, is the slow, mysterious evening 
of our childhood, or its dawn, anticipating 
change, as you turned away ? Or, rather, where 
is the child that enjoyed them by your kindly 
ray, — retaining now, of all which was its iden- 
tity, only the dense sleep, the illimitable dreams, 
of those intervening nights? Do you call to 
mind, you that saw them often, its after-supper 
frolics ; its Hallow-e'en captures, despite tub 
and candle ; its inopportune studies, stolen out 
of mere greediness to know, — a fever long sub- 
sided? You were kind to that something of 
yesterday, dead as Amenophis now. Gleam, 
in some recess of the south, to-night, on bright- 
eyed F., who answered its young jests, and 



86 900SE-QUILL PAPERS, 



journeyed with ir over the icy river, arm-in- 
arm ; and on T>. G., austere yet gentle, who 
played Brutus once to its Cassius ; and rise not, 
rise wot too soon upon our Philippi ! 

You have been fed, Cynthia ! upon the 
homage of mortal lips : you have had praises 
from the poets exquisite as calamus and myrrh. 
Many a time have we rehearsed before you such 
as Ave recall, from the sigh of Enobarbus, — 

44 sovereign unstress of true melancholy ! M 
to the hymnal 

" Orbed maiden ! with white fire lade 

or the noble salutation of a mirthful-mournful 

spirit over seas : — 

" Oh ! thou art beautiful, howe'er it be. 
Huntress or Dian, or whatever named ; 
And he the veriest pagan, that first fr:r. 
His silver idol, and ne'er worshipped thee!" 

Drummondj Sidney, Milton, glorified your wan- 
derings. And your truest votary, one John 
Keats, spake out boldly that, 

"the oldest shade midst oldest tr 

Peels palpitations when thou lookest i 



AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON. 87 

You are an incorrigible charmer; but as you 

are likewise 

~ a relief 

To the peer, patient oyster, where he sleeps 
Within his pearly house," 

we infer, with pleasurable surprise, that you are 
something better: a humanitarian. 

Now, we venture to assert that you remem- 
ber compliments, meant to be of this same Or- 
phic strain, and inscribed to you, of which we 
are not wholly guiltless. We have all but knelt 
to you. The primeval heathen has stirred within 
us. We have been under the witchery of Isis. 
We aspire to be a Moonshee, rather than any 
potentate of this universe. 

We wound you not with the analytic eye, nor 
startle you with telescopes. The scepticisms of 
astronomy enter not into our rubric. Are you 
not comely ? Do you not spiritualize the dark- 
ness with one touch of your pale garment ? 
Then what are they to us, — your dimensions 
and your distances? Gross vanity of knowl- 
edge ! Abuse of earthly privileges ! 



38 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

If we affect the abusive,, shy of more ceremo- 
nious forms of address, forgive us, Luna ! We 
make recantation, and disown our banter. We 
extend the hand of cordiality even to your 
Man. How blithe and beauteous he is ! He is 
embodied Gentility. We bow to him as your 
anointed Viceroy, your illustrious Nuncio. You 
know our immemorial loyalty, nor shall our 
rogueries teach you so late to doubt it. For- 
give us, benignant, peaceful, affable, propitious 
Moon! Poet are we not, nor lunatic, nor 
lover; "but that we love thee best, most 
best ! believe it." 




BRENTFORD PULPIT. 




ROM a little church of some celebrity, 
and from a remote corner in its quiet 
nave, come these rude by-gone impres- 
sions, transcribed faithfully, save in whatsoever 
is mainly personal and local. No word is here 
of Brentford choir or Brentford pews; but a 
record, strict and spare, of the now vanished 
figures who expounded texts to the village folk. 
For the most part, they were but birds of passage, 
seldom remaining long enough to lose the gloss 
of novelty, or to escape the awakened scrutiny of 
young eyes. Two only of these preachers were 
widely known; but each of them, on the other 
hand, possessed a striking individuality. The 
"King of Brentford," as readers of a certain 
swinging translation of Beranger will remember, 



40 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

was something of an anomaly ; and Brentford 
chaplains, at least in their public career, were 
indubitably of his court. 

First, shall we not recall the Beverend L., with 
his soft majesty of speech, having in it an ever- 
recurring sforzando, peculiarly impressive and 
overpowering, — L., with his benignity of soul 
and his keen, evanescent smile, intellect flashing 
through it, like lightning over a sombre waste of 
waters ? He required the closest attention of any 
speaker to whom we have listened. The following 
must be incessant, the allegiance unabated, lest 
the Emersonian and gossamer-like sequence of 
ideas, the swift beauty of phrase and figure, elude 
you, never to reappear the same. His playful- 
ness in the pulpit was unique. Subdued it was, 
yet how potent ! Humor has many a fit abiding- 
place in this world, of which the pulpit seems last 
to be chosen. But L/ s discretion was royally 
sure. His salutary wit, felicitous in placing 
itself, and infrequent enough to rouse attention 
always newly, went on angelic errands with its 
Puck's wings. An apostolic purpose consecrated 



BRENTFORD PULPIT. 41 

his airy thrusts at evil. The hand of steel was 
present ever under his caressing touches. 

We surmise that if there was anything con- 
nected with his vocation which L. abhorred, it 
was the necessity of periodical charity-sermons. 
When induced to appear as pleader on these occa- 
sions, his conduct was amusingly characteristic. 
He played hide-and-seek with his petition; he put 
it off, eyed it curiously, fenced with it, and kept 
it at arm's length ; then, beginning to advocate its 
claims, he held it up for your inspection reluc- 
tantly, as if it were no child of his, and his right 
were rather to befriend it in private than thrust it 
into public notice. He would say a few glowing 
words, making his fortitude under such an emer- 
gency as truly a hint to your benevolence as his 
spoken plea. He would sum up for you the 
misery of the poor, the lamentable differences in 
comfort, the evils that spring from unalleviated 
poverty, the precept of brotherly love, the imper- 
ative command of giving and sharing and making 
glad ; all this with an air of indifference over facts 
in array, and of needless appealing to such hearts 



42 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

and such purses as yours were sure to be! L. 
could have written noble charity-sermons for 
another's delivery, but to ask in his own person 
was wellnigh impossible. He seemed to rebel, not 
against the actual discomfort of his position, but 
rather against the advisability of reminding you 
of a duty you never could have forgotten. In 
his chivalrous dealing he smote your sensibilities 
more surely than many a professional beggar with 
seven small children; and the shekels leaped in a 
fountain from you and from everybody else, un- 
til the alms-box overflowed. L.'s utility in this 
strange office was quite wonderful, even to him- 
self. His very exordium, "Dear old friends!" 
was, though he knew it not, irresistible. On the 
morrow, Workhouse Tommy with a new cap, or 
barefooted Molly in the exhilaration of a sturdy 
dinner, must have blessed the shy and half-resent- 
ful claim which a great heart put forth as theirs. 
L/s preaching, for the most part, whether in 
its bright or solemn phases, was best understood 
by those who best knew the man. Like Walter 
Savage Landor, in whom he delighted, and whom 



BRENTFORD PULPIT. 43 

he strongly resembled, he required appreciators as 
well as hearers. He loved a thoughtful audience, 
and to such spoke with all the outpouring of his 
mightier self. There were minds of a certain 
cast, wholly foreign to his sympathies, which were 
slow to be persuaded into a belief of his accessi- 
bility. Yet a meeker and kinder heart than L/s 
never beat. Half the country knew him as a fine 
theologian, and scarce fifty for the "sweet sociable 
spirit" that he was. A touch of the intolerance of 
genius he had indeed, without which the symme- 
try of his character would have been impaired. 

D., with his active and high-strung temper- 
ament, was your true conversational preacher, 
treating with glad and reverent familiarity 
"thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls." 
Beneath the sounding-board he was perpetually 
on the defensive. He was always setting you 
straight, putting you in the way of seeing good, 
reconciling you to your antipathies. If we may 
use the word to signify a process so gentle, he 
hammered his optimism into you. You must be 
cheerful, you must be thankful, you must be self- 



44 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

sacrificing ; there was no escaping it. D., in his 
zeal and his amiability, was a far-away echo of 
John the Evangelist; and the phrase, "My little 
children/' came with peculiar unction from his 
lips. His voice was not powerful. It may have 
been a slight hesitation and reluctance of speech 
which gave it an especial charm. " Somewhat he 
lisped, " also, like Chaucer's Friar ; if not 

— " for his wantonnesse 
To make his English sweete upon his tonge." 

We remember that once, by some chance de- 
velopment of his favorite topic, he came across a 
wayside tramp, and gave him an apotheosis laugh- 
ingly called to mind whenever one of that thence- 
forth respected species lights upon our path. 

" Here is a vagabond, an outcast of society," 
began the Reverend D., with his usual high-bred 
gesture of expostulation, — "a good-for-nothing 
beggar whom you brush as you pass; and drawing 
aside, mayhap in your heart of hearts you despise 
him. You have no right to despise him. Noth- 
ing has destroyed or will destroy the eternal 



BRENTFORD PULPIT. 45 

brotherhood between you. Despise him ? Why, 
it is a disloyalty to mankind. In the eye of 
Heaven sinlessness is the criterion, not riches or 
health or intelligence. And he may stand nearer 
to the Throne than you, because of a more repent- 
ant spirit. Why should you despise him? It 
belongs to you rather to love and aid him. He 
is a reflection of yourselves, distanced from you 
by the mean formalities of the world, but fash- 
ioned like you without and within, and co-heir 
of whatever has fallen to your share. What you 
have been taught through the dignity of manhood 
and womanhood to think yourselves — that is he. 
He is the Image of Uncreated Beauty. He is the 
Wedding Guest in the palace of the King. He is 
the Mortal who shall put on Immortality. He 
is the Son of the House of David, the hope and 
joy of Israel. His head is like Carmel, and his 
form as of Libanus, excellent as the cedars. Dare 
you despise him ? Even as you deal with him 
in your thought, should the Most High deal 
with you in our great day forthcoming ! " 
This extraordinary burst was delivered with 



46 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

indescribable serenity. We have but suggested 
the gorgeous language in which D. revelled when 
he chose, nor hinted at the peculiarity of pose and 
intonation which helped to make his words vital. 
To one hearer, at least, the effect was superb, and 
the tramp was established in his native dignity 
forever. 

Dr. E. had the artistic temperament, being a 
poet of rare worth. There was always a fine met- 
aphoric haze about his sermons. He was by na- 
ture diffident and somewhat listless ; the effort of 
mounting the pulpit stair must have been dis- 
tasteful to him. His phrasing was of extreme 
nicety and justness ; and he spoke English pure 
and simple. Yet his " Greek languor," his low, 
unobtrusive voice, served to veil the excellence of 
his thoughts. He was shy of any display. His 
Sunday efforts certainly did not become popular, 
in the Brentford acceptance of that term. But 
while *E., like the clouds, seemed gray always to 
heedless eyes, to brighter perceptions he must 
have shown the delicate, transitory tints of 
the rainbow. He had two great merits : his 



BRENTFORD PULPIT. 47 

quotations, scriptural and other, were exquisitely 
apt; lie likewise knew the value of sudden epi- 
logues. You had not time to suspect that the last 
rounded period was having its dying fall, before 

" He straight, disburdened, bounded off as fleet 
As ever any arrow from a cord." 

Altogether another type of Levite was the Eev- 
erend M., of clear Puritan descent. He had an 
expansive personality, and could rise to any occa- 
sion, clothing what he had to say in easy and ele- 
gant language. As a rule, his sermons, not to 
speak it profanely, were pacifying as an opiate. 
But sometimes he stood before his astonished 
hearers not wholly as a symbol of the peace- 
maker. 

For his text, many years back, he once took 
the " abomination of desolation, spoken of by 
Daniel the prophet," Matthew xxiv. The awful 
sublimity of his reading prepared his auditors 
for what was to follow. Hearts were stirred to 
the depths that day, with the measured musical 
utterance, the dread and calm authority, such as 



48 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

fancy had conceived proper to the Recording 
Angel. M. never seemed quite so aerial and boy- 
ish in his proper person again. That one grand 
sermon shed its supernatural light still over him, 
as he walked on Monday and Tuesday in view of 
the laity. It seemed as if all his previous and 
subsequent words and ways were a disguise, and 
that only on the never-to-be-forgotten morning he 
had been revealed. None of his other attempts 
were thereafter held in comparison with this, an 
advantage not to be doubted. A magnificent 
prejudice in his favor would fain have forced 
upon his every parley the beauty which the 
first had worn. 

We last heard the Reverend M. (he was then 
nearing his sixtieth year) on the evening of a 
Christmas day. We recall that he began by 
poetically picturing the corresponsive hour of 
that primal Christmas when the divine Child lay 
slumbering in His mother's arms, the hush of 
the Bethlehem hills, the unconsciousness of the 
broad kingdom that " knew him not." Little 
by little, the monotones of this tranquil dis- 



BRENTFORD PULPIT. 49 

course fell, like so many snow-flakes, upon our 
eyelids. A swinging festoon of smilax, stirred 
by chance beneath the pulpit edge, charmed us 
deeper into oblivion. The light ran in eddies 
on the faint gray walls. The visible, the palpa- 
ble, were as if they had not been. We had 
slipped from our moorings into the irresistible 
depth of dreams. 

Presently we heard anew, half-distinctly, half- 
confusedly, " expectaiio gentium ! " We looked 
towards the starting-point of that Latin spray, 
but nothing followed upon our sudden rousing 
save the burst of the organ. All about us was 
a rustling and a stirring, such as the Ephesian 
sleepers might make at the awakening. Horri- 
ble ! Dreams were over for many others beside 
the solitary culprit we had supposed ourself. 
Bonnets nodded ; furs were smoothed ; numbed 
feet were tapped upon the carpet for resuscita- 
tion; and Chubbuck in the next pew rubbed 
his eyes, to the imminent extinction of those 
useful auxiliaries. Heaven forgive us our drow- 
siness ! How much aesthetic pleasure, how much 

4 



50 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

spiritual profit Brentford missed that night, befits 
us not to conjecture. Yet we palliate the dis- 
graceful circumstances, due in no wise to lack 
of virtue on our part, or of eloquence on the 
Eeverend M/s, by surmising that the general 
slumber was a tribute of itself; not, indeed, a 
protest of weariness, or ungracious abstraction 

from duty, but rather an affiliation with the 

« 

time and the theme 

"made all of sweet accord." 



Who shall gainsay it? 

The like hap, we are sorry to state, never 
befell us under the spell of that austere prelate, 
Theophilus A. One could as soon have grown 
mindless of a Gatling gun in full activity. He 
was an ecclesiastical thunderbolt. Ferdinand 
would have put him on the Inquisition. He 
could have served the mediaeval writs of excom- 
munication on kings, or stood with high-hearted 
Hildebrand to confront the German at Canossa. 

A. was pale, but not weakly, with his daunt- 
less eye, his luminous front, his unrelaxed lips 



BRENTFORD PULPIT. 51 

drawn like a bowstring. He was all vehe- 
mence ; his dearly-beloveds had scintillations to 
them ; his very firstlys and secondlys had the 
heroic ring. 

Did he wear the armor of the ancestral Franks 
under his clerical dress? Whence got he that 
tremendous vigor, that aptitude for great and 
hazardous things ? Apollyon could scarcely have 
lessened the vitality of this Christian by any 
combat, however long and fierce. 

You must have felt his presence helpful or 
harsh, as your organization prompted. A harp 
will quiver with a concussion in its vicinity. So 
with mortal men and women in juxtaposition 
with the Eeverend A. He had aroused splendid 
impulses, so it was said, in many lands; but 
the ultra-sensitive soul was scarcely adapted to 
his touch. He it was who could make Willard, 
serene as a child, shake like an aspen-leaf at his 
mildest peroration. 

More comfortably enchanting wert thou, 
K. ! whom every tongue praised. Welcome was 
thy young cherubic countenance, dawning mid' 



52 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

way between the roof and the aisles ! "Worthy 
of Talma was that shining dramatic gift which 
brightened a hundred-fold the utterances of thy 
manly piety ! Who could make doubtful issues 
surer than thou, least didactic, yet most prac- 
tical of preachers? Who could so boldly pur- 
sue a simile, eking analogies out of stones ? 
Who so pitiless on impostures and shams, when 
thy gallant oratory 

" Blew them transverse, ten thousand leagues awry " ? 

Peter the Hermit, with his crusading spirit, 
would have loved thee. 

It was the fashion at one time to classify K. 
along with Dr. S., of a neighboring city, a gen- 
tleman with whom he had few mental traits in 
common, outside of the gift of eloquence. S. was 
the inimitable to his parishioners ; and he had, 
like Bobadil, "most un — in one breath — utter- 
able skill, sir ! M The matter of his sermons 
could have been turned without alteration into 
blank verse, having cadences manifold. He 
spoke rapidly and moved alternately from side 



BRENTFORD PULPIT. 53 

to side in lieu of gesticulation; he studied no 
opportunity, but lavished his fine things, like 
an almoner at a coronation, here and there 
and everywhere. 

K., never a user of notes, and no less sponta- 
neous than his famous reputed rival, was habit- 
ually careful of detail. His imagination was 
gorgeous. His activity ran to the verge of rest- 
lessness. Thoroughly earnest and exhilarating, 
his large intelligence was cheery as a breeze 
from the mountain-top. 

Neither can we forget Brentford's Titanic vis- 
itor, magnificently verbose, looming at his ex- 
traordinary height, with a fund of simplicity 
and gentleness hidden somewhere beneath that 
generous exterior. How guileless he was, how 
tender ! — " invaluable at a tragedy." The peti- 
tion which Mr. Thomas Prince delivered in the 
Old South would have fallen with equal grace 
from N/s lips : — 

"O Lord! we would not advise; 
But if, in Thy Providence, 
A tempest should arise 
And drive the Trench fleet hence, 



54 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

And scatter it far and wide, 
And sink it in the sea, 
We should be satisfied, 
And Thine the glory be ! " 

With what fervor, two parts patriotism, one 
part innocence, would N. have pronounced that 
mischievous supplication ! 

His conscientiousness carried him once a little 
too far; and the sequel "dimmed these specta- 
cles/' as Thackeray used to say. It was to us 
the funniest thing that ever happened in sacred 
precincts, — funny beyond all power of endurance. 

" When Solomon finished the Temple/' said 
the B,everend N., in his sonorous tones, — " when 
Solomon finished the Temple he sacrificed one 
hundred and twenty thousand sheep and twenty- 
two thousand oxen." Now, that was incontest- 
able. But immediately a wretched little doubt 
crept in upon his Biblical assertion. " Seventy 
thousand — ur — ur — twenty thousand sheep/' 
continued the Reverend N., " twenty hundred 
thousand ox — ahem ! I mean two hundred 
thousand, a hundred and twenty — ur — [very 
slow and deliberate reiteration] : two and twenty 



BRENTFORD PULPIT. 55 

thousand oxen, one hundred and twenty thou- 
sand sheep." "When the last sheep came on the 
scene we were suffering from agonies of laughter. 
Let us trust that they turned their meek and 
startled eyes another way. 

There was H., too, a white-haired logician 
who had proved everything, from the Creation 
down to the principles of good and evil in the 
most neglected "queer small boy; " E., drawing 
exquisite homely illustrations from the sea ; and 
gracious little B., the polished rhetorician, most 
deferent in his manners of address, most scrupu- 
lously reliant on the sense and rectitude of those 
around him. 

"Honor and reverence and good repute" be 
with them all now, wheresoever they may labor 
or rest. We think sometimes we have heard 
Cyril and Polycarp among them. 

Our incurable tendency towards observation — 
the fact of our having been born in an Observa- 
tory, so to speak — stands as apology for touch- 
ing on the heaven-appointed mannerisms of 
Brentford Polycarps and Cyrils. 





NOTES MADE BY TROILUS GENTLY. 

ENTLY was a middle-aged, bookish 
friend of ours, in no way remarkable 
save that he unconsciously nullified 
Emerson's smiling prediction, and wore off a 
pencil-point in writing down the disconnected 
fancies of a few days. Poor T. G. has long been 
gathered to his fathers. In justice to the pencil, 
we transcribe some of his memoranda : — 



No pleasure or success in life quite meets the 
capacity of our hearts. We take in our good 
things with enthusiasm, and think ourselves 
happy and satisfied ; but afterward, when the 
froth and foam have subsided, we discover that 
the goblet is not more than half-filled with the 
golden liquid that was poured into it. 



NOTES MADE BY TROILUS GENTLY 57 

Beciprocity of good-will, and not compatibil- 
ity of tastes, is the first requisite of friendship. 

How singularly fresh and sweet is Mozart's 
music ! — like the cadence of waters over a rocky 
bed, or the bird-chorus of a May morning. His 
melodies and those of Nature have always some 
subtle association. It is as if we knew the 
noble mother, and walked often by her side, and 
some fine day we meet the intelligent and sport- 
ive child, finding in his voice, his gestures, his 
salutation, something foreshadowed to us in that 
other, and beautiful in both. 

Life is a breathing-space between two eterni- 
ties, a holiday with appalling realities behind 
and before. 

Barbarians t€ speak with naked hearts to- 
gether : " we have polite conversation. 

I am fond of smelling the spring, — detect- 
ing growth before it shows itself by the deli- 
cious damp odor in the fields. Snow and rain 
have their separate fragrance. I know at a dis- 
tance the aromatic pine, the eatable wliiff of 



58 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS, 

birch-bark, the oily sweetness of sappy maples, 
the tart goodness of a sorrel-patch, and the 
scent of crushed tansy. 

The Chinese countenance is impassive, as if 
the old, old weight of Asiatic civilization had 
blunted and oppressed it. 

Yandyck deified his sitters. He is like the 
sun in Shakespeare's line, — 

" Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy." 

A good dinner is not to be despised. It 
paves the way for all the virtues. 

B. knew a little French girl who always in- 
sisted, with a pretty extravagance of intonation, 
that pigs in their grunt were saying, "Nous 
aurons conge." 

When a soul finds nothing to reverence among 
its common surroundings, it is blind indeed. 

The beauty of youth is inconstant and shift- 
ing as the tint at the heart of a rose, not two 
mornings the same ; or the fall of snow-flakes, 
blown by every wind into new and airy rela- 
tionships. 



NOTES MADE BY TROILTJS GENTLY. 59 

The Brook Farmer is extinct now as the dodo. 
It would be a delight to come across one who is 
sensitive yet on the subject of that Arcadian failure. 

When genius seems to work disregarding rule, 
we may be sure that it has assimilated to itself 
whatever is best in every rule. 

The undertaker ostensibly reverses the vener- 
able truism that "the young may die, the old 
must/' by thrusting forward the smaller coffins 
in his awful windows, and keeping the others 
(in the subjunctive mood, as it were) well in 
the background. 

The mind is fearless so long as there is no 
reproach of conscience. When that comes, come 
breakage and bondage and a host of terrors. 

Shelley was all fire and air. His eye had 
perpetually the fixed light of a day-dreamer's. 
There is a marked resemblance between the por- 
trait of him taken at Rome in 1819, bv Miss 
Curran, and that of Sir Philip Sidney, engraved 
from the original and prefixed to Grosart's edi- 
tion, — a resemblance not astonishing save to 



60 GOOSE QUILL PAPERS. 

those unacquainted with both mild and "hero- 
ick spirits/'' 

It seems a little difficult to discern clearly 
the happiness or misery of those very near to 
us in affection. Souls have their perspective, 
and need to be removed from the eye,, that it 
may scan them justly. 

Sickness is such a humiliation that some can- 
not survive its first infliction. 

We try hard to cure superstition, which has 
been defined as the surplus of faith, the mere 
foam and scum of what is valuable. Over- 
confidence and enthusiasm, which are in the same 
degree the excess of hope and love, w r e do not 
try to cure at all. 

Thomson, the poet, was so lazy that he used 
to eat peaches off the trees, standing with his 
hands contentedly plunged in his pockets. 

Would not the weather hang itself in despair 
if no notice were taken of it, and if every man, 
woman, and child forbore to speak of it for 
three successive days ? 



NOTES MADE BT TROILUS GENTLY. 61 

"Frostling" used to signify a bough, blos- 
som, or fruit nipped by the cold ; and " wind- 
ling " one blown from its natural support ; 
two sweet and expressive words, now obsolete 
and without synonymes. It is hard to account 
for their being left behind in the race for the 
development of our English. 

"W., whose beliefs are quite fixed, vacillates 
nobly in matters of opinion. In a group of 
debaters he holds with no one long, but must 
needs jump at a conclusion so liberal and sure 
that it reconciles all hostilities. 

All lovers are bewitched, steeped in illusions, 
versed in the oracles, — the riddle themselves of 
the whole world. 

u Ye smiler with ye knif under ye cloke ! " 
What a picture in that line of Chaucer ! 

The Puritan was a man of severities. He 
never forgot that God struck Oza and buried 
Pharaoh in the sea. He went through the world 
wearing his creed, like a sword, solely for aggres- 
sive purposes. 



6'Z GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

The deficiency of gentle manners, in one not 
bred to their practice, can nearly always be sup- 
plied by sensibility or by tact. 

" Take them, great eternity ! 
Our little life is but a gust 
Which bends the branches of thy tree 
And trails its blossoms thro' the dust." 

I never knew a critic to note the metaphor in 
these musical lines of Longfellow, but it seems to 
me quite haunting and overpowering, and of ex- 
traordinary beauty. 

"When you wear your old and shabby coat, 
anticipating a continued storm ; and the sun 
shines, making you out of place with your ill- 
chosen garb, how natural it is to trace the analogy 
from dress to manners, and to reflect how poor a 
show r premeditated surliness and sourness make 
in the broad light of the world ! 

We die and are forgotten ; but must we forget ? 

The Greek pastoral compliment, "Thou 
singest better than a cicada," w r ould do very well 
now-a-days for an amiable old lady to address to 
her tea-kettle on the hob. 



NOTES MADE BY TROILVS GENTLY. 63 

Thoreau greatly rejoiced in what he called his 
" invisible suit, " a sort of mottled brown- 
and-green stuff in which he could cross a field 
undetected. 

There was once a golden age because golden 
hearts beat in it. If it come again, it will scarce- 
ly be through scientific progress. 

What an excellent, high-minded motto would 
the last words of Walter Ealeigh make : " So 
the heart be straight, it matters nought how the 
head lieth/ J It is an echo of that celestial text, 
" Be ye not solicitous/" and implies serene dis- 
regard of all but things essential. 

It may be exacting, but not a whit so beyond 
justice, when I feel that if I serve the king, he 
must repay me in love and trust, or my allegiance 
cannot thrive. 

I came of late across a newly told jest of C. 
Lamb's concerning Stilton cheese, which pleased 
me tremendously, having the indubitable flavor of 
his wit, and being (what is rarely the case with 
floating anecdotes of him ) unmistakably his. 



64 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

I cannot recall faces or forms that I have sel- 
dom met, or recognize them again with ease, 
unless some revealed trait or expression of soul 
has made gait, contour, and presence memorable. 

Pride is the distorter of souls ; cheerfulness the 
helper ; love the beautifier ; sorrow the redeemer. 

If I ever had the heroic strain, it has re- 
ceded beyond my own perception; and like an 
athlete out of practice, I have to " brace " be- 
fore doing that which is right, in defiance of 
inclination. 

" The pure in heart shall see God, " — severe 
and lovely touchstone for mankind. 

I saw once two sisters, the younger resembling 
the other as the translation of a poem does its 
original, moving by the same laws of beauty, 
yet inevitably lacking something of the earlier 
grace and flavor. 

Twenty-third May, 1881. Hawthorne buried 
seventeen years ago to-day. u Who henceforth 
shall sing to thy pipe, O thrice-lamented ? Who 
shall set mouth to thy reeds ? M 



NOTES MADE BY TROILUS GENTLY. 65 

How very considerate of the failings of others 
must that man be who remembers constantly the 
Infinite Mercy he himself needs ! 

A good temper is a jewel extraordinary, and a 
worker of wonders. One of the old chroniclers i 
tells of an irresistibly amiable monk who for some 
misdemeanor was sent to hell and released again, 
because Satan could not provoke or torment him. 

The sight of a hearse against the joyous streets 
is always depressing : a dark line drawn through 
thoughtless festivity, like the dread writing on 
the wall at Belshazzar's feast. 

C/s poetry has much simplicity, calmness, pas- 
toral sense, and beauty ; his prose is jerky and bar- 
baric. He is a sort of medal having the king's 
head finished on one side, the rough uncouth sur- 
face wanting a stamp on the other. 

An odd and good resolve, — to carry the right 
hand always ungloved, lest one should meet a 
friend, and be off one's cordiality, so to speak ; or 
a foe, and be off one's self-defence. 

5 



66 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

Eeserve is made sometimes of chain-mail, some- 
times of solid plate steel. One is as good armor 
as the other, though not so obvious. 

Some people wear out everything quickly and 
naturally, — clothes, acquaintanceship, books, 
pleasures, even dear life itself. 

I am delighted at Lowell's saying that our 
modern terms, " the deuce " and " Old Scratch, " 
were evidently derived from dus and scrat, hairy 
wood-demons among the Celts and Teutons. 

The best of everything is the only individual of 
that thing. We should ignore the rest. 

I think one of the drollest stories I ever heard 
of absent-mindedness, is this of old P., the bar- 
rister. He and his friend M. were sitting close 
together about the hearth of a winter night. 
There was no light ; they were alone and silent. 
Suddenly P. got thinking of some project, and 
according to his villanous and immemorial habit, 
meditatively began to scratch his cranium. He 
came to a pause; but recovering the sequence of 
his thoughts, felt compelled likewise to resume 



NOTES MADE BY TROILTJS GENTLY. 67 

the physical operation. But this time P, wildly 
clutched not his own, but M/s profuser locks, 
and furiously recommenced. M. stood it for 
a moment, inwardly convulsed with laughter, 
then lightly removed the offending hand; and 
P. roared out angrily , faltering in the middle 
of his speech with a bewilderment beautiful to 
see : " Great George ! don't you suppose I have 
a right, a right to — to — You don't mean to 
say that was n't my own head ! " 

Standing is the most royal and natural pose. 
I have a sympathy for that Eoman emperor who 
sprang to his feet to meet the quick death that 
came upon him. 

Spenser : " The noblest mind the best content- 
ment has." Thoreau, by way of exemplification : 
" I shall not fret to be a giant, but be the biggest 
pygmy that I can." 

Hawthorne wrote with his conscience. It was 
a sort of celestial-colored ink which he kept by 
him, and into which ever and anon he dipped 
his pen. 



08 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

I was struck anew, of late, with the complete 
ideality of the Venus of Melos, its charm of 
detail, out-naturing Nature : the head so deli- 
cately moulded, the neck so slender yet so 
strong, the scarce-deviating outline from shoul- 
der to hip; the very apotheosis of health and 
beauty, with a spirituality over all that sets you 
thinking of a sweet and ample heart within. 

There is scarcely a blow in after life compa- 
rable to that first sad intimation (perhaps in 
early youth), that human nature is not what 
we thought it, not the thing of our dreams; 
little else than a tissue of frailties woven 
together. 

Shakespeare's "Rosalind" is not very dis- 
similar to the best type of the much-maligned 
American girl. She is full of " frolic parley," 
self-reliant, tender, womanly. 

" Old hushed Egypt." Put down that golden 
phrase, along with many another, to Leigh Hunt. 
When a delightsome author threatens to be for- 
gotten, credit him at least with what he has 



NOTES MADE BY TROILUS GENTLY. 69 

added to the soul of literature, and let him be 
buried ■■ with all his travelling glories round 
him." 

The French language is eau sucre ; the Ger- 
man " A cup o' thy small beer, sweet hostess." 

If I have a friend, though absent many years, 
I hold a true treasure with fear and trembling, 
knowing that whatever losses come, I have been 
blessed beyond measure with the wealth no chance 
can take away. 

Love is unlike the bow of Ulysses, in that 
it can be drawn to its full capacity of magnifi- 
cence or destruction not only by the greatest. 

I know a man who looks like Boccaccio, and 
does not appreciate it. 

Genius, like the lowly insect having prophetic 
stirrings of the beauty it is to evolve, needs 
solitude, and must build it unaided for itself. 
If it come forth in due time winged and lovely 
to the sun, or if it die in the dark, unsus- 
pected of its aim, either end will be found best 
relatively to the life it affects. 



70 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

There is no participator who serves so well in 
any conversation as an adept in commonplaces 
and "words, words, words." 

Milton's " charm of half-awakened birds " 
means charm in the pretty old English sense 
of "twittering," "piping softly and confusedly." 

Much of Thomas Hood's more serious work 
is overlooked by the public eye. Some one will 
be obliged to come forth by and by to say, 
and to say truly, that nobler poems than the 
"Haunted House," the "Poet's Portion," and 
" Death " were never written. 

In the matter of reform, I should choose 
often to be a crab-reformer, and to move back- 
ward after many wish-worthy things of yesterday. 

Thackeray says somewhere that " we see the 
world, each of us, with our own sight, and 
make from within us the world we see." 

By way of experiment, a youngling of schol- 
arly race might be kept wholly from books, 
etc., to see if the ancestral learning would not 
revive of itself. 



NOTES MADE BY TROILUS GENTLY. 71 

It pains me to see coarseness predominant in 
the human countenance, — a thing so ethereal and 
divine of itself. Think of the forerunning wrongs 
back in the generations which have prompted and 
helped it to its present degradation ! 

The poets, in chronicling strong emotion over 
things actual or imagined, must frequently outgo 
the force of the emotion in the expression of it, 
so that they have the power of draining off the 
whole supply and depth of their feeling. 

Coleridge should have lived in the times of 
the oracles. He would have " drawn/" as we 
say, better than Delphi. 

At the funeral of a celebrated artist, wherein 
I took no part whatever, and had only a gen- 
uine sorrow for the public loss to excuse my 
slipping into the church, the sexton wanted to 
seat me conspicuously, taking me fqr a chief 
mourner, for a relative at least, he said. I was 
pleased at the limiting clause. 

Children are born optimists, and we slowly 
educate them out of their heresy. 



72 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

We are stricken mute by an heroic death. 
Praise is poor and vain if the life forerunning 
it was heroic too ; and if it was not, love 
and forgiveness seem not half good enough to 
offer at the ruined shrine, where at last a divin- 
ity has descended. 

In sensitive natures, just as the ordinary bless- 
ings of life cast an aggrandized shadow and 
result in supreme pleasure, so their denial be- 
comes a matter of deep pain, equally dispro- 
portionate to the cause. 

It is better to fall into added disrepute with 
an enemy than to alienate a would-be friend. 

Frankness prevents troubles that only time 
can cure. 

A good and worthy life cannot be detached 
or wholly useless, because unfinished. "When 
you throw a number of broken rings on the 
floor, on lifting one you find it casually joined 
with another, and each, in turn, with many more. 
So must a man's endeavor co-operate with a 



NOTES MADE BY TROILUS GENTLY. 73 

predecessor's, and be linked again with some 
life-work to be ended to-morrow, in beautiful, 
enduring sequence; though to outward vision 
all three were but severally a fragment and a 
failure. 





ON TEACHING ONE'S GRANDMOTHER 
HOW TO SUCK EGGS. 

N the clays of the schoolmen, when no 
vexed question went without its fair 
showing, it seems incredible that the 
proposition hereto affixed as a title provoked no 
labyrinthine reasoning from any of those musty 
and hair-splitting philosophers. Aristotle him- 
self overlooked it ; Duns Scotus and the noted 
Aureolus Philip Theophrastus Bombast de Hohen- 
heim Paracelsus were content to repeat his sin 
of omission. Even that seventeenth-century Eng- 
lish essayist and scholar, " whose understanding 
was wide as the terrene firmament/' neither un- 
earthed the origin of this singular implied prac- 
tice, nor attempted in any way to uphold or 
depreciate it. The phrase hath scarce the grace 



ON TEACHING ONE'S GRANDMOTHER. 75 

of an Oriental precept, and scarce the dignity 
of Roine. It might sooner appertain to Sparta, 
where the old were held in reverence, and where 
their education, in a burst of filial anxiety, 
might be prolonged beyond the usual term of 
mental receptivity. 

It is reserved, therefore, for some modern in- 
quirer to fix it, for certain, whether the strange 
accomplishment in mind was at any time, in any 
nation, barbarous or enlightened, in universal 
repute among venerable females ; or else espe- 
cially imparted, under the rose, as a sort of 
witch-trick, to conjurers, fortune-tellers, Pytho- 
nesses, Sibyls, and such secretive and oracular 
folk ; whether the initiatory lessons were theoreti- 
cal merely, and at what age the grandams (for the 
condition of Aypermaternity was at least imper- 
ative) were allowed to matriculate themselves 
in the precincts of this lost art. 

It is a partial argument against the antiquity 
of the custom, and against the supposition of its 
having prevailed among old Europe's nomadic 
tribes, that several of these are accused by 



76 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

historians of having destroyed their progenitors 
so soon as the latter became idle and enfeebled ; 
whereas it is reasonably to be inferred that the 
gentle process of ovisugescence, had such then 
been invented, would have kept the savage fire- 
side peopled with happy and industrious cen- 
tenarians. After the arduous labor of their long 
lives, this new, leisurely, immeasurably mild and 
genteel trade could be acquired with impercep- 
tible trouble. Cato mastering Greek at eighty, 
Dandolo leading hosts when past his nonage, 
are kittenish and irreverend figures beside that 
of a toothless Goth grandmother learning, with 
melancholy energy, to suck eggs. 

We know not why the privilege of education, 
if granted to them without question, should have 
been withheld from their gray spouses, who cer- 
tainly would have preferred so sociable an in- 
dustry to whetting the knives of the hunters, 
or tending watch-fires by night. But no one 
of us ever heard of a grandfather sucking eggs. 
The gentle art was apparently sacred to the 
gentle sex, and withheld from the shaggy lords 



ON TEACHING ONE'S GRANDMOTHER. 77 

of creation, until the fierce creatures, ignorant of 
the innutritious properties of the shell, took to 
devouring them whole. 

By what means was the race of hens, for in- 
stance, preserved ? Statistics might be proffered 
concerning the ante-natal consumption of fledg- 
lings, which would edify students of natural 
history. One bitterly disputed point the noble 
adage under consideration permanently settles ; a 
"uibble which ought to have 

"staggered that stout Stagyrite," 



and which has come even to the notice of grave, 
inductive theologians : videlicet, that the bird, 
and not the egg, may claim the priority of exist- 
ence. For had it been otherwise, one's grand- 
mother would have been early acquainted with 
the very article which her posterity recommended 
to her as a novelty, and which, with respectful 
care, they taught her to utilize after a fashion 
best adapted to her time of life. 

Fallen into desuetude is this judicious and 
salutary custom. There must have been a time 



78 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

when a yellowish stain about the mouth denoted 
an age, a vocation, a limitation, effectually as the 
bulla of the youth, the maiden's girdle, "the 
marshal's truncheon, or the judge's robe/' or 
any of the picturesque distinctions now crushed 
out of the social code. Let a cynic add, who 
does not fear to chase a trope beyond bounds, 
that though certain misguided ancient ladies may 
lapse, contemporaneously, into the burlesque and 
parody of suction, and draw towards themselves 
some yet coveted fooleries, compliments, gallan- 
tries, — alas ! anachronisms both ; yet the or- 
thodox sucking of eggs, the innocent, austere, 
philosophic pastime, is no more, and that the 
glory of grandams is extinguished forever. 

The dreadful civility of our Western woods- 
men, the popular dissentient voice alike of the 
theatre and of the political meeting : the cast- 
ing of eggs wherefrom the elements of youth 
and jucundity are wholly eliminated, affords a 
speculation on heredity, and appears as a faint 
echo of some traditional squabble in the morn- 
ing of the world, among disagreeing kinswomen, 



ON TEACHING ONE'S GRANDMOTHER. 79 

the very primordial Battle of Eggs ! where re- 
loading was superfluous,, where every shell told; 
whose blackest spite was spent in a golden rain 
and hail ! What havoc over the face of young 
creation; what coloring of pools, and of errant 
butterflies ! What distress amid the cleanly 
pixies and dryads, whose shady haunts trickled 
unwelcome moisture ! terror not unshared even 
in the recesses of the coast : — 

"Intus aquae dulcis, vivoque sedilia saxo, 
Nynrpharum domus ! " 

One can fancy the younglings of the vast human 
family, the success of whose lesson to their elders 
was thus over-well demonstrated, marking the ebb 
and flow of hostilities, like the spirits of Riche- 
lieu and of the superb fourteenth Louis eviii* 
the great Revolution. What marvel if, struck 
with remorse at the senile strife of them whom 
old Fuller would name " she-citizens/' they 
vowed never, never, to teach another grand- 
mother to suck eggs. So was it, maybe, that 
the abused art was lost from the earth. 



80 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

Nay, more, its remembrance is perverted into 
a taunt more scorching than lightning, more 
silencing than the bolt of Jove. "Teach your 
grandmother to suck eggs ! M Is not the phrase 
the "scorn of scorn/' the catchword of insub- 
ordination, the blazing defiance of tongues un- 
broken as a two-years' colt ? It grated strangely 
on our ear. We grieved over the transformation 
of a favorite saw, innocuous once, and convey- 
ing a meek educational suggestion. We came 
to admit that the Academe where the old sat at 
the feet of their descendants, to be ingratiated 
into the most amiable of professions, was noth- 
ing better in memory than an impertinence. 
And we sadly avowed, in the underground cham- 
ber of our private heart, that, as for worldly 
prospects, it would be fairly suicidal, all things 
considered, to aspire to the chair of that pro- 
fessorship. 

Let some reformer who cherishes his ancestress, 
and who is not averse to break his fast on an 
omelet, dissuade either object of his regard from 
longer lending name and countenance to a vulgar 



ON TEACHING ONE'S GRANDMOTHER. 81 

sneer. Shall such be thy mission, reader ? We 
would wish thee extended acquaintance with that 
mysterious small cosmos which suggests to the 
liberal palate broiled wing and giblets in posse ; 
and joy for many a year of thy parent's parent, 
who is in some sort thy reference and means of 
identification, the hub of thy far-reaching and 
more active life ; but, prithee, wrench apart their 
sorry association in our English speech. Purists 
shall forgive thee if thou shalt, meanwhile, smile 
in thy sleeve at the fantastic text which brought 
them together. 




OLD HAUNTS. 




SOMETIMES whimsically liken myself 
to that pursued bird, who, according to 
naturalists, spends her fine speed and 
strength in racing in a circle about her nest, until 
overtaken and overborne. She may be said to 
travel a great deal, yet her steps tend nowhere, 
and despite her coming and going, she is indubi- 
tably at home. 

1 betake me, with all the exhilaration of a 
tourist, into an adjacent county, and after expe- 
riencing the forlornness proper to a forty-years' 
exile, board the railway train, and throw myself 
into the arms of my native town. My wildest 
perambulations are but twenty miles away. I set 
out, with vehement desires to behold the world, 



OLD HAUNTS. 83 



and threading tlie narrow highways known of 
mine infancy, — 

" downwards to the sea 



Or landwards to the west," 

return to look the stoutest navigators and ex- 
plorers in the eye. My change of scene is mainly 
from Bromfield Street (what a green-and-golden 
westerly prospect it has !) to the Eidge Path of 
the Common ; my perilous adventures are on 
side-walks ; my discoveries, in omnibuses and 
the windows of shops. 

Through sheer liberality and open-mindedness, 
when the first stirrings of spring are in the 
blood, or when a hearty October morning tempts 
idle feet afar, myself and one other seize on a 
map of the adjacent country, and push over hill 
and dale into some unexplored solitude. We 
make heroic efforts to appreciate a landscape. 
Was it not yesterday, thou best Bostonian ! that 
we accomplished our showery pilgrimage across 
the Middlesex Fells, now drenched, now dried, 
by fickle skies, to sniff the young violet, and 
to pluck the silvern willow-tufts ere thev had 



84 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

paled ? or marched nigh six leagues of an Ar- 
cadian afternoon to front the gleaming waters 
at Ponkapog, the purple crests of Milton Hill ? 
Vainly ! Never saw we a Nereid along a pebbly 
margin, nor caught the cadence of a Hama- 
dryad's footfall, as she hurried back to her old 
woods. The curse is upon us, as saith the prob- 
lematical Lady of Shalott. What business have 
we in the country ? Where is the plant that 
will teach us its name ? Not green fields, but 
bricks and mortar are our affinity ; and the ears 
that delight in the familiar roar of a crowd 
barely attend by courtesy to the madrigals of 
thrushes. 

Eivers I can put up with. I can keep pace with 
Charles from Hopkinton to the sea. Neponset 
is a dear good prattler. Musketaquid, with his 
two exquisite parental streams, is mine old famil- 
iar. So with a pine grove, where one can watch 
the tardiest star arise, and the earliest daybeam 
break over its dark summits. But these ever- 
lasting downs and scrubby wildernesses, these 
formal, vacant pastures, with little white houses 



OLD HAUNTS. 85 



at chilling distances ! it is not in me, by nature 
or by grace, to take kindly to the things. The 
spirit moveth me to look down on cows, hens, 
and cabbages, and to question the beauty of that 
manner of life where there is scarce a ratio of 
one fellow-creature to an acre. How shall your 
country folk learn to jostle and be jostled ? Do 
they know a pick-pocket when they see him ? 
Are they easy in their minds when street-bands 
are due ? Have their unhappy progeny never 
spelled out a circus-bilFs gorgeous charactery 
of blue and red, nor leaped into the jaws of a 
watering-cart, nor licked a lamp-post for a wager 
on a frosty night ? 

No, my masters : let Damsetas and Daphnis 
sing at each other, over the heads of their woolly 
cohorts ; I yearn for the whoop of the contem- 
poraneous newsboy, and for the soul-satisfying 
thunder of wagons. I hasten back to the knee 
of mine illustrious mother-city, as a Peri to Para- 
dise, or as a convict (we must have comparisons 
to suit all tastes) to that agreeable castle in which 
the State formerly entertained him. I am let 



86 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

loose anew on her historic thoroughfares. For 
her sake, I subsist, in no gastronomical sense, on 
dates, and pay court to hoary tombs and spectres 
of long-supplanted buildings. Her story is the 
kaleidoscope to charm my idle hours. Her an- 
cient magistrates I behold in their portentous 
wigs. Her little maids rustle by in stomacher 
and kirtle. Jovial laughter floats out from the 
unlatched door of the Green Dragon ; the aroma 
of venison betrays itself at the Cromwell's Head. 
I look upon sorrowful Quakers boarding the 
transportation ships, or at the beacon-light flaring 
out upon the bay ; at Paddock, planting his me- 
morial trees ; at Mather Byles jesting among a 
crowd, under the Province House eaves; at Phile- 
mon Pormort shaking the birch at little Ben 
Franklin on the sunny side of School Street ; at 
the chivalry of France riding twenty deep behind 
the drawn sword in thy gallant hand, Viomenil ! 
Over all the shifting and confused panorama the 
great bells of Christ's — "Abel Eudhall cast them 
all " — are ringing the remembered chimes of 
home. 



OLD HAUNTS. 87 



"The tilings to be seen and observed/' said 
Bacon, " are the courts of princes, the courts of 
justice, consistories ecclesiastic, churches, monas- 
teries, monuments ; walls and fortifications, havens, 
harbors, antiquities, ruins, libraries, colleges, ship- 
ping, gardens, arsenals, burses." Rather than sigh 
for Cisalpine revelations, shall I not gloriously 
disport myself in following the fortunes of a local 
Punch and Judy show, such as our kind civic 
nurse hath provided for us ? Perhaps elsewhere 
I should miss the white-bearded orange-vender 
dozing in the sun, and the sparrows fighting on 
the sombre steps of St. Paul's, and seedy students 
migrating from stack to stack of Elizabethan 
books in the tranquil lane that Uriah dotting 
built. Dearer than coffers of gold are the old 
cherished places from which my rooted affections 
cannot stray. Their inviolate memories and their 
hopes are mine; and the city of my content is 
the loop-hole through which I gaze and wonder 
at the universe. 

I wear out my restlessness circling round about 
her shining height, and breaking ever and anon 



88 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

momentarily from her fostering hand, to cling to 
it again with laughter, and so move on. Is it a 
braver sentiment to fret after reported continents ? 
I would follow the moon around the untried 
earth, for the asking ; and yet, and yet, " three- 
hilled rebel tow r n " ! hate my own free spirit did 
it not thirst for thee on a ship that sailed against 
the Golden Horn, between Caucasus and the pin- 
nacles of Greece. 




EBEE THOUGHTS ON BOOKS, 



I 



HE passion for collecting books, begin- 
ning with the Greeks, passed to the 
Eoman senators and patriots, and thence 
to every corner of the civilized earth. A phi- 
losopher might sigh, like Omar at Alexandria, 
over the thousand thousand superfluities, whose 
survival embitters the thought of the lost vol- 
umes of Varro and Livy, the wellnigh inacces- 
sible tomes of Al Farabi of Farab (" who knew 
or wrote so much as he?"), of Berni, of Mar- 
torell ; or of those princely libraries instanced 
by Irish antiquarians, which were swept away 
by Noah's flood! 

A line of shelves, throne by throne, filled with 
illustrious figures, what else is that but a pres- 



90 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

ence-chamber kinglier than a king's, the Temple 
of Wisdom, more reverend than the altars of 
Pallas ? Men have lived and died, like motes of 
the air, hovering about this hoarded precious- 
ness of ages, and forgetful ever of the awakened 
world, with its exquisite outlook into the future. 
In the pathetic companionship of books lived 
Southey, long after their beauty was shut out 
from him, passing his trembling hand up and 
down their ranks, and taking comfort in the 
certainty that they had not forsaken him. 

Remembering a bibliopole's sincere care in 
gathering his treasures, the taste and tenderness 
he spends upon them, the actual individuality 
of the owner of which they partake, and which 
they proclaim with startling fidelity so long as 
they are together, an auctioneer's sale of a pri- 
vate library seems one of the cruelest things 
in the daily annals of a city. Yet if not trans- 
ferred, in numbers or in the mass, to some 
benign shelter, the darlings of bygone hours are 
sure to be launched friendless on the rough 
chances of trade. A second-hand book is verily 



FREE THOUGHTS ON BOOKS. 91 

a pitiful thing. It is broken down by adversity, 
and ready to meet your advances half-way. It 
appreciates care of any sort, poor waif that 
it is ! lacking attention so long in the dingy 
precincts of a shop. Nothing is more gratify- 
ing to the eye searching for tokens of humanity, 
like a shipwrecked sailor along the sands of a 
lonely island, than its curled edges, " bethumbed 
horribly," especially if the author thereof be dear 
to you. What a precious, homely tribute ! What 
delicater flattery, than to catch sight of a mod- 
est volume, supposing you take some parental 
interest in it, in a condition which, a posteriori, 
does not suggest soap and water? 

Certain books, which we handle for the first 
time, we cannot for the life of us lay down 
again, without vehement infringements on that 
edict forbidding envy and covetousness. We 
yearn for such a bit of property. Our pocket 
seems predestined to filch it. We love it much 
better than its proprietor, who never had the 
spirit to give it cordial abuse. We would not 
endure that paper cover veiling its genial face. 



92 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

We would scorn to divorce it from any dusty 
nook it chose to frequent. If we abduct it, it 
would be a great deal happier. On the same 
principle, it requires an impulse of Spartan right- 
eousness to return a book to the civic library 
with the proper dispositions. It is heart-rending 
to make over a used and shaken veteran to the 
custody of the public, anew. We know well 
enough that it shall collapse utterly ere we shall 
have the virtue to borrow it a second time. Or 
we speculate on an inestimable octavo, reader- 
less on the shelf for scores of years, till our mark 
is set over against it, and doomed to deeper 
than Abyssinian solitude when we loosen its 
clinging hold ; and wonder if what a townsman 
and a wit called " bookaneering " would not be 
a chivalric pursuit for us to follows 

Uniform sets of any author, save a historian, 
are terrors to the discriminating eye. When 
we buy the Works even of one C. Dickens, we 
shall stipulate that the "Tale of Two Cities" 
(never to be named without reverence) shall get 
its just due of difference in size and hue, 



FREE THOUGHTS ON BOOKS. 93 

from any of its admirable kindred. Who wants 
Beaumont and Fletcher in sombre cloth, or 
in anything out of folio, or Jeremy Taylor in 
red morocco and gilt? Prefaces are not ill 
things in their places ; but what has a preface 
got to do with jolly, self-explanatory Pepys; or 
a table of notes with Walton the Angler; or a 
glossary — fancy the pert thing ! — with Philip 
Sidney's sonnets ? Illustrations to some tales 
are insufferable. Picture a menagerie let loose 
on the seventh or eighth page of Rasselas, to 
bear out the diverting Johnsonian description of 
the sprightly kid bounding on the rocks, the 
subtle monkey frolicking among the trees, the 
solemn elephant reposing in the shade ! 

" A big book/' said Myles Davis, " is a scare- 
crow to the head and pocket of author, student, 
buyer, and seller/' That depends. The virile 
poets, like Burns, cannot be got into sylph-like 
draperies. Nobody could abide a prose Milton 
less than three and a half inches thick. Proissart, 
even, must be taken solid. We own up to lov- 
ing our stumpy Don Quixote, with its print of 
beauteous Dorothea laving her impossible feet, 



94 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

although it be egregiously fat, and elbow its 
comelier neighbors right and left. 

The fashion of including the productions of 
two or three contemporaneous writers in one 
volume is happily past, and may not revive. 
What dreary comradeship ! like that of the 
ghosts driven together on the blast, in Dante's 
wonderful fifth canto. Why should Coleridge 
the dreamer, and Campbell the planner, be lashed 
so, wrist to wrist ; or Waller's sweet dallying 
verse classed with Denham's sagacious strophes ? 
What joint mundane sin warranted this posthu- 
mous halving of their immortal fortunes ? If the 
trade must economize, and readers must needs 
get their literature in bunches, let the coupling 
be done on a saner basis, and arise from the 
affiliations, not of time or place, but of genius 
solely. We confess we should like to see Sher- 
idan and Farquhar amicably sharing applause, 
within the compass of one lively-colored quarto ; 
some of the singing-birds of the second and 
third Stuart courts caged with Gay, Matt Prior, 
and a few r modern bardlings ; Keats close to 



FREE THOUGHTS ON BOOKS. 95 

his loved Spenser; and Irving familiarly fixed 
by Addison and 'Goldsmith, the barriers of cen- 
turies between them broken down. 

Family traits, like murder, will out. Nature 
has but so many moulds; and however unique 
and quaint a writer may be to his own circle, 
look up his intellectual pedigree, and you shall 
recognize the ancestral quality astray in him, 
on an altered world ; the voice of Jacob, indeed, 
appealing through all disguises. What should 
Poe be like, — Poe the one and only, — but a 
blended brief echo of Marlowe and of Dryden ? 
Whence came Charles Lamb, even, in great part 
(and Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt besides, in the 
collateral line), but from golden-hearted Sidney 
and Sir Thomas Browne? Pages and pages of 
his that recall them ! every tone of their old 
sedater voices prophetic of his sweet laughter, 
his fine, grave reasonings to be ! 

My young lord is spirited, but unlike his 
father or mother in feature, as in character : ah ! 
go to the remotest corner of the portrait-gallery, 
and brush away the damp from the dark face of 



96 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

that Henry who fell at Crecy, and you shall read 
the mystery of transmission. A poet tries his 
morning lay, to a continent's delight, and after 
years of joy and triumph it shall be revealed 
to him how the self-same music fell from long- 
silent lips in a land across the sea. The unal- 
tered radiance of an inspiration streams yesterday 
on one, to-morrow on another, as moving sun- 
shine visits the hundred panes of a cathedral 
window ; and that elusive thing which we name 
the originality of any artist resembles little else 
but the kaleidoscopic newness of color thrown 
hourly along the aisles. 

So much have books wrought, to the confusion 
of the proud. The child's early, unconscious 
preference for authors of his choosing, urges itself 
upon him when he, too, shall write, and softly 
hoodwinks his imagination. Has he a sensitive 
pen, jealous of its rectitude, true as the mag- 
net-lured steel to what he believes to be his 
frank, unshared fancies? How shall that affect 
the immutable law? For the very blood in his 
veins is not all his own ; and though, for honor's 



FREE THOUGHTS ON BOOKS. 97 

sake, he would change the erect port, the persua- 
sive speech, the innermost personal charm which 
was called his, and which he finds, later, to 
have been but a legacy, — yet, in places where 
his detecting conscience cannot follow, the hered- 
itary principle will grow to blossom, and bespeak 
him, blamelessly, to be what the centuries have 
made him. 

It was feelingly said by one of the gentle 
English essayists last named : " How pleasant is 
the thought that such lovers of books have 
themselves become books ! " and do so become 
evermore, beginning and ending with a secluded 
library shelf, planting the seed of kindly influ- 
ences close to the noble shade which sheltered 
them in youth, and under which they slumbered 
many a summer's day. 




A NOVEMBER FESTIVAL, 




ERE it is, the old bright day, the day- 
fragrant of home, brought about once 
again by the whirligig of time. The 
New England snows are deep beneath the win- 
dows in the house where I was born, and iri- 
descent icicles hang over the door ; the city that 
is beyond is given up to joy and plenty, 

"And all that mighty heart is lying still." 

I sit quite solitary among you in a far-away 
corner, forgetfully turning the pages of a book, 
and letting my thoughts take wing for other 
scenes and other years. In memory there arises 
a succession of Thanksgivings, long gone into 
dust and ashes, so different from this, so careless 
and kind and merry, that it seems like wronging 
them to be sad for them even at this distance. 
Then all the world was golden, and our wilful, 



A NOVEMBER FESTIVAL. 99 

loving lives were jewels set in the heart of it. 
Then the air tingled, and the sun was jolly as 
Harlequin. Then there was a little brook in 
those familiar fields, delicately sheathed in ice 
every Thanksgiving morning, and lending itself 
to a childish holiday frolic just in the nick of 
time; and a stone, squirted along its surface, 
made the daintiest bird-like sound imaginable, 
and died into silence so delightfully that you 
sent innumerable pebbles after it, to see if they 
could sing as sweetly as the first. Then every- 
body was so considerate and tender that poor 
people could not want or suffer on that day, if 
they tried ; then grown people were indulgent, 
and wee people docile and frisky as lambs. 
Then we used to have pop-corn and ginger- 
snaps and chestnuts and ruddy apples — and 
turkey ! Well, we can have turkey yet, on 
any Thanksgiving, a sort of in memoriam tur- 
key, eaten in foreign lands, and made melan- 
choly with recollections and vain wishes ; so, of 
course, it is not the same turkey at all. 

What a hospitable, social old festival it was ! 



100 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

How gentle we tried to be, that not one harsh 
word should spoil it ! We were taught to make 
out of the severely pious Thanksgiving of the 
Puritans, their dismal, unpicturesque opposition- 
Christmas, a day lovely and blithe and helpful 
beyond any in the calendar. There was a great 
halloo going on the whole time in the cheerful 
rambling old house, quartering an army of chil- 
dren : merry-making in the pantry, in the corri- 
dors, in the porches, where hungry sparrows 
gathered to squabble over hundreds of crumbs ; 
and in the lively fire that winked and sputtered, 
and tossed the pans and kettles, and nearly burst 
a-laughing over the fat plum-pudding. As for 
the other Lords and Ladies of Misrule, you could 
not swing your arm anywhere without brushing 
a little boy or a little girl. You heard the 
patter of their tireless feet, the noise of their 
drums and doll-carriages, and the echo of their 
shrill voices upstairs and down, — some of them 
rolling about on the rugs in the sunny room, 
where the bare elms, with their battered nests, 
rattled against the pane on windy days ; some 



A NOVEMBER FESTIVAL. 101 

strumming on the venerable piano in the hall, 
just at the balustrade's foot, and singing a little 
Tyrolese catch they had learned together; some 
grouped in the shadowy and quiet library (where 
the ceiling shone blue with its myriad stars, like 
a real summer's sky), telling over how good a 
king King Arthur was, or how queer was the 
Old Man of the Sea, or how sad and strange 
were the adventures of dear Sintram, ever and 
ever so long ago. Now other children fill those 
neglected places, and beautify the hours with 
associations fresh and fair as ours, — 

"And year by year our memory fades 
Trom all the circle of the hills ! " 

I must not forget the races, and the games, 
and ninepins on the frosty balcony ; the ice-forts, 
puny for lack of material, and the Trojan war, 
re-fought in snow-balls ; and the dinner ! The 
table-cloth was very pretty, with sprays of ever- 
green festooning it here and there. Silver mugs 
looked particularly shiny. I can see yet, beyond 
the great steaming dishes, the celery towering 



102 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

with its delicate green ; cider sparkling ; grapes 
and oranges crowding one another over the rim ; 
olives floating in colored bottles ; jelly clearer 
than crystal ; fanny little crackers in funnier 
shapes, and the ring of hearty faces framing 
the picture in. Near the end, the majestic pud- 
ding made his appearance, crowned with blue 
flame ; and blazed away so pompously for a min- 
ute that the youngest baby cried, and the boys 
clapped their hands, and curly-haired Helen 
leaned over against Bessy to get out of its way. 
Then came the final jingling of the water-glasses, 
when the household drank Grandmother Drapow's 
health, amid enthusiasm and tears and laughter 
and rustle of words. It was quite in order to 
wear your tissue-paper cap, which fell out of 
the candy-packet, whether it. was quaint and odd 
as could be, or conventional as a beaver. When 
presently, with all conceivable glee, the whole 
twenty-six rose to their feet, the chairs and stools 
made volcanic noises, and the scene looked pre- 
cisely like the Carnival. Then a sudden hush 
fell ; and one of the several tall gentlemen who 



A NOVEMBER FESTIVAL. 103 



answered to the name of Papa, glanced at a cer- 
tain child at the other end of the table. So the 
child dropped its bonbons, and gravely took off 
its gay cocked hat, and folded its brown hands, 
and lisped the words of the grace, while Eugene 
and little Georgie bobbed their innocent heads 
in cadence at its shoulder. Everybody answered 
u Amen ! " very loud and clear. And everybody 
slipped forthwith through the door, like the tide, 
and left the sunny dining-room deserted. 

Those Thanksgivings will never return. The 
caps are torn now, and the heads that wore 
them would fit them no more. "We could not 
meet to be happy again, if we tried, because of 
the vacant places. The rogue who was made 
parson would not be present either, — which of 
us, outside Paradise, is quite the same after so 
many years ? — having vanished just as surely as 
the old friends, and the dear kindred, who have 
died. For, in your own phrase, little folk, that 
was me. At least, I like to think it was. Per- 
haps this is all a make-believe story ; but if you 
doubt it, go and ask somebody else who was there. 



VAGABCMDIANA. 




ERTAIN words sound like caresses. 
" Thou vagabond ! " must have been at 
some time or other a gentler appellation 
than our rude transition would make it. Why not ? 
" Rogue " and " truant " have yet their playful 
uses. Though we translate illy such endearments 
of antiquity, we may read in Gascoigne : — 

" Abraham's brats ! O brood of blessed seed ! " 

The " goodly and virtuous young imps " of old 
citation, we should also construe but saucily. 
Besides, " vagabond " lendeth itself gracefully to 
the affectionate diminutives of alien tongues, 
which, to a philologist, may be as good as an 
argument : what can be tenderer than vagabond- 
chen, vagabondellino, and a like musical play of 
syllables over the solid English rock ? 



VAGABONBIANA. 105 



The vagabond is the modern representative of 
the knight-errant, shorn of his romance, inas- 
much as both fall neatly under the definition of 
a stroller, a free lance, whom the domestic Lar 
does not allure or attach to any one fireside. 
The immortal Don of la Mancha, revived in this 
age, should figure as a tramp in the police station, 
before he had adorned public life twenty-four 
hours. But the vagabond proper has an Asiatic 
cousin, who gets princelier treatment. The 
Eonin of chivalrous Japan is a gentleman of lei- 
sure, who, not averse to a chance of seasonable 
employment, roams at large, settling his private 
differences, and serving Heaven unmolested, accord- 
ing to his lights. Vagabonds are legally denomi- 
nated " such as wake on the night, and sleep 
on the day ; and haunt customable taverns and 
ale-houses, and rout about ; and no man wots 
whence they come nor whither they go : " a com- 
prehensive statement in three parts, which has, 
moreover, a covert whimsical reference categori- 
cally to actors, politicians, and bank-clerks. A 
vagabond, primarily, was merely an idle person ; 



106 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

and if his name has come to imply variations of 
decorum, and a questionable standing in polite 
circles, it is to be accounted for only on the 
worn adage that Satan takes personal care of 
undedicated energies. 

Our friend is vagrant as the swallow, "born 
in the eighth climate, and framed and constellated 
unto all.'" He is the world's freeman. He 
strays at his fancy, sign-boards and mile-stones 
his only ritual, and changes of weather the sole 
political economy of his study, by which he 
abides. Everybody's property is his in fief. 
Terminus and his stakes were never set up for 
him. He has no particular reason for moving 
on the first of May, nor for passing the winter 
in warm quarters. When he is very weary, since 
he has no tent to strike, nor bed to make, he 
unconcernedly " lays his neck on the lap of his 
mother." Neither landlord nor tenant is he ; and 
never has he known a spring-cleaning, nor packed 
a trunk, nor priced a door-plate. He trolls out 
that joyful strophe which Richard Brome wrote for 
his forefathers, as he swings past inland villages : 



FAGABONBIANA. 107 

" Come away ! why do we stay ? 
"We have no debt or rent to pay, 
No bargains or aecompts to make, 
Nor land nor lease, to let or take : 
Or if we had, should that remore us, 
When all the world *s our own before us, 
And where we pass and make resort, 
There is our kingdom and our court ! " 

He lias his choice of professions : he may have 
a natural disposition to beg, yet, on the whole, 
consider it genteeler to steal. He is exempt from 
Adam's curse. Nobody expects him to work, 
save in a moment of inspiration. When he has 
no funds, he travels on his dignity. There is 
that in his eye which awes the merchantman, and 
mesmerizes the maid at the hostel gate. 

The vagabond, " extravagant and erring spirit/' 
as Horatio would call him, has had his court- 
painter, who took the portraits of several of his 
eccentric family in the year of Waterloo, and 
exposed them for sale in Covent Garden under 
the title : " Etchings of Eemarkable Beggars, 
Itinerant Traders, and other persons of Noto- 
riety," drawn from the life in London town. 
There glisten perennially the seraphic upturned 



108 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

eyes of " Hot Peas ! " there you may see the 
Hogarthian face and attitude of the one-armed 
vender of gasping "Live Haddock I" the pasto- 
ral cousin offering " Young (toy) Lambs ! " the 
dealer in pickled cucumbers, his arms akimbo, 
a fork stuck in the dish on his head, and a sur- 
reptitious wink in his well-conducted eye ; the 
flying pie-man, smirking like Malvolio, and 
starched and skirted like a dignitary of bluff 
Hal's ; the reduced beau, sweeping crossings, 
with his yet fastidious air; and the humble be- 
spectacled painter, his own drayman, changing 
quarters on holy Luke's day, so festooned with 
torsos, casts, brushes, phials, easels, that he 
seems a perambulating studio. 

The vagabondistic sect is of exceedingly muta- 
ble nature. It distends, it contracts; it swears 
in, now a person of probity, not of wealth ; now 
a sinner, like the rest of us, who seldom moves 
in good society : an odd congregation, comprising 
dozens that have no business among the elect, 
and lacking a proportionate number who stray 
untethered into other folds. On this showing, 



VAGABOND! ANA. 109 



not only all mendicants, pedlers, street-singers, 
pick-pockets, and uneasy minds are accepted 
rascals, but poor queer B., who wrote poetry, 
and went veiled like the great Mokanna, dis- 
traught to know whether the aggregate stare 
of her fellow-citizens was attributable to her 
renown, or to her scarce Hellenic beauty, falls 
into the same category ; and the venerable cam- 
paigner, who tacks on to her hurdy-gurdy 
a certificate of army membership signed by 
Napoleon (presumably to be referred to her fight- 
ing spouse, deceased), — that wrinkled and taci- 
turn spook of what was once French vivacity 
and grace, faithfully grinding " Partant pour la 
Syrie" in snow and sun, within a fixed radius 
of Boston Common, — even she must emerge, 
despite the music of Austerlitz and Jena, nothing 
short of a naturalized Yankee vagabond ! There 
are laws yet unrepealed, Celeste ! for thy sup- 
pression; prices set on the innocuous heads of 
" minstrels and useless persons/'' 

We could wish that a new Plutarch should 
write up the patron-saint of vagabonds, — one 



110 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

Bampfylde Moore Carew, a Devonshire celebrity 
born under William and Mary, a most conscien- 
tious, well-bred person, and of good parts, who 
became a gentleman at large only under irresist- 
ible conviction ; and who, after a series of adven- 
tures before which an Arabian tale covers its head, 
rose to be king of the gypsies, and Great High Joss 
of beggars and mimics, henceforward : a pleasant, 
adroit creature, familiar with the wildernesses of 
what were not yet the Atlantic States, reckless 
enough to be kindly-disposed towards his fellows, 
and successful in everything he undertook, living, 
r * gray as a wharf-rat, and supple as the devil/' 
to a consistent and edifying old age. 

We have a sneaking kindness for him and his 
votaries. A congenital affinity softens us towards 
suspicious characters. We were early aware that 
we startled shop-keepers with our roving thumb, 
how or whence we know not ; but we have come 
to love the indiscreet something in us which calls 
forth Puritan vigilance, and we should violently 
resent a change of tactics. More than once a 
jeweller (who might have made a mad wag if 



VA GABONDIANA. Ill 



he had not been so choked with virtue) refused 
to give back our repaired watch, eying us with 
grewsome distrust, and absolutely disclaimed hav- 
ing beheld our cockney countenance before ! We 
enter a warehouse, only to await identification, as 
they are pleased to call it, from Tom, Dick, and 
Harry, and only by force of eloquence, or by lit- 
eral making of faces (honest, ingenuous, reliable, 
unevasive faces, out of use, but quite as good as 
new, and triumphantly effective), do we succeed 
in securing the household necessities. Reading 
once, of a windy day, seated on the sea-wall of 
the Charles, through a chance waiting-hour, in 
cloistral privacy, we were accosted across lots by 
a sombre policeman, and mysteriously lured back 
to the confines of civilization; whereupon the 
misguided creature, scanning our cheerful linea- 
ments, — cheerful from the pages of " Travels 
with a Donkey /* — burst into uncanny laughter, 
and presently explained that he had been detailed 
to save yon despondent crank from plunging into 
the hungry river ! 

Our career of vagabond by brevet had well- 



112 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

nigh closed. Seriously, sir or madam, you may 
stand by that harbor-mouth, and have an inkling 
into the tragedies of the strollers of whom " men 
wot not whence they come, nor whither they go." 
But, to keep you on the liberal side of compas- 
sion, you who are not of the faith must also be 
made aware that Aldebaran is a gracious star to 
his own; and that "wild and noble sights" are 

r- 

vouchsafed to the outer and inner eye of shab- 
biest Bohemianism, "such as they that sit in 
parlors never dream of." 





MATHEMATICS. 

EADAMANTHUS is so old by this 
time, and so hardened into his own way 
of thinking, that I suppose it is use- 
less to wish he were of my "mind. What I look 
upon as justice, he may, moreover, call spitefulness, 
or worse. But I dearly desire to sit enthroned by 
Styx in his stead, that I might adjudge dire repa- 
rative torments to old Euclid and to Eaton, that 
modern figurative fiend, and to the entire tribe of 
evil-inventing Arabs. What hope is there in this 
world for redress ? Such creatures have been laud- 
ed as friends of civilization and of human progress. 
Tens of thousands, mostly helpless minors, and stray 
rebels of all ages, among whom I am but a meek 
atom, make passionate protest. We go about, with 
an ancient school-rhyme for our Marseillaise : — 

8 



114 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

" Multiplication 's a vexation, 
Subtraction 's just as bad ; 
The Rule of Three, it puzzles me, 
And Fractious drive me mad." 

We aspire to be moderate. We handle a slate 
and pencil forgivingly. We consider that history 
is somewhat against us ; for Csesar believed dog- 
gedly in addition; and the generals of the great 
Alexander were fond of division all their days. 
We try to get over our distrust of the Book of 
Numbers, and to think it quite canonical ; vainly, 
vainly. We are still the army of the disaffected ; 
and your numeric blood, which was transfused 
into us by main force, seethes and hisses in our 
unproselytized veins. 

Mine antipathy to a unit, like an ancestral 
prejudice, developed in infancy. I cannot recon- 
cile myself to that persistent squandering of my 
capabilities — and nothing shall persuade me that 
they were not fine, primarily — on insufferable 
jargon of twice two, and thirteen times twenty- 
seven ; on angles, polygons, hypothenuses,and roots 
of diabolic cubes ; on halving and cancelling every- 



MATHEMATICS. 115 



thing Solomon in his wisdom had never heard of, 
save the growing, intact, substantial aversion out- 
lasting all else. What glory and honor did it bring 
me? The singular privilege of taking and giving 
money on faith ; of confusing ounces, yards, and 
quarts, and of being ""circumvented," as Burton 
scornfully put it, "by every base tradesman." 

The Vallais cretins, it is confidently asserted, 
cannot be taught mathematics. If so, the Yallais 
cretin is my cousin-german. My heart warms to 
him. I am his transatlantic affinity. He is the 
happier, inasmuch as his little eccentricity is 
recognized, and no tampering follows ; whereas I 
fell heir to years of crazy importunities. I be- 
think me with anguish of so many precious hours 
spent between sunrise and sunset, in compulsory 
handling of snaky arithmetical characters, when I 
might have mastered the literature of Timbuctoo, 
or successfully dug out, in a mellower land, the 
hoary toy-pistols of little child Astyanax. It is 
drilled into my younger brethren and sistren 
( such is their venerable and true English title ! ) 
that a cipher to right of them, or a cipher to 



116 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

left of them, under certain circumstances which 
happily I forget, make vast differences with silly 
figures. Not one of the unfortunates is a 
stranger to such dogmas. A visitor of class- 
rooms, with a proper dash of vinegar in him, 
knows nevertheless that the tender geometric par- 
rot-prodigy shall scarce be taught some more cu- 
rious problems : why political bribery is not a state- 
prison crime, nor oppression of dumb beasts, nor 
marriage — tempora ! — without love. There- 
fore the cretin wears his rue with a difference, and 
is enviable. He is not chained up (simply because 
it is the general barbaric custom) to "the hard- 
grained muses of the cube and square ; " that is, 
not unless he gets astray on the educational world, 
and finds it quite useless to proclaim his identity. 
If any one take kindly to the Black Art (as 
he might to the small-pox), he must, of course, 
be humored. Believe him sincerely mistaken. 
Perhaps he may not ripen into a college professor 
whose business it is to disseminate his evil lore. 
Perhaps, Heaven assoil him ! he may. 




A CHILD IN CAMP. 

IKE the royal personages in the drama, 
I was ushered on the stage of life, 

literally, with flourish of trumpets. The 
Civil War was at its bursting-point, the President 
calling for recruits : it was impertinent of me, 
but in that solemn hour I came a-crowdng into 
the world. And since I was born under alle- 
giance, a lady whom I learned to love with 
incredible quickness, 

"0 bella Liberta! O bella!" — 

rocked my fortunate cradle. She gave me a little 
flag for toy, instead of coral-and-bells ; and filled 
my virginal ear with the classic strains of " John 
Brown's Body/' ere yet I had heard a secular 
lullaby. She it was who dyed my infant mind 



118 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

in her own tri-color, and whose exciting compan- 
ionship roused me surprisingly early into wide- 
awake consciousness and speculation. In laughing 
recognition of her old, old favor, these confused 
twilight memories (Impressions of America, as it 
were, ab ovo) may be recorded. 

A young person some twenty-four years my 
senior, for whom I had a violent liking, had 
preceded me "to the warres." I saw his ship 
sail away, at that exceedingly tender age when 
a human being is involved in mummy-like cere- 
ments, and cannot properly be said to exist 
at all. In the winter of 1864 — he had been 
away during that long interval — I enlisted 
and went South to visit him. I had thrived 
at home through the distended agony of those 
days. I had a general idea that my cue in life 
was to fight; and I w r ould smile endearingly 
over a colored plate of the Battle of Trafalgar, 
whose smoky glare, and indications of turmoil 
and slaughter, were supremely to my mind. 
Red, however, by some process of mistaken zeal, 
I came to regard as inimical to the party to 



A CHILD IN CAMP. 119 

which, as catechumen, I belonged. I had not 
then a very copious vocabulary at my com- 
mand ; but I soon indicated my convictions 
by screeching like a young eagle at the most 
innocent auction-flag that ever floated out of a 
Boston door of a sunny morning, or flushing 
with unmistakable wrath at a casual visitor who 
bore a trace of that outrageous color in any- 
thing worn or carried. It was long, indeed, 
before I was persuaded to transfer my mis- 
guided sentiment to a. d. 1775, and to believe 
that the neighboring rebel had no especial affin- 
ity with the hue in question. Prior to my mem- 
orable journey to Virginia, I had spent a few 
months in camp the year before. A slight epi- 
demic ran the rounds of the tents, and took 
in ours. The only recollection which survives 
is a vivid one of neighboring trees, and a dis- 
tant hill, visible as I lay facing the narrow 
door; a view which included the ever-flitting 
figure of the sentinel, his steady, silent tread, 
musket on shoulder, and the kind rustic face in 
profile, which turned, ever and anon, smilingly 



120 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

about, like the moon at her merriest. That 
welcome shadow which fell before him in the 
broad light was cut down in the ranks at Mal- 
vern Hill. 

But my earliest real experiences began in 
'64. Hostilities had been some weeks sus- 
pended ; yet the headquarters of a Southern 
regiment lay within gun-shot, and thither my 
delighted terrors reverted. Was Jeff Davis lurk- 
ing on the other bank of the stream? Might 
they creep over by night and fall upon us ? 
If I should be allowed to venture alone into 
the thicket, would the fiery eyes of the " reb n 
glare upon me? Please could I settle difficul- 
ties with any little boy in the opposing camp ? 
in the admirable Roman fashion, of whose prece- 
dent I was yet ignorant. 

How they would laugh, those bearded and 
epauletted guests of our exceptionally elegant 
log-house ! And how uproariously they often 
planted me, regardless of ink and paper, on the 
table, and toasted me in some cordial beverage 
until I pranced in glee ! 



A CHILD IN CAMP. 121 

Be it humbly admitted that the freedom I 
enjoyed among officers and men of several or- 
ganizations, and the indulgence which they 
showed, tended not to improve my scarce se- 
raphic disposition. More than once was I called 
to order for some breach of discipline, the most 
venial of which were cutting the tent-strings, 
hanging about the sentry and impeding his prog- 
ress with efforts to relieve him of his musket, 
or concealing the drum-sticks to postpone an 
anticipated signal. The dark-eyed young man 
to whom I owed allegiance — 

" Ay me ! while life did last that league was tender/' 

— would exclaim, with the awful sense of a 
newly acquired dignity : " Disobey a colonel if 
you dare ! " and threaten me, not with vulgar 
deprivations of supper, or trivial captivity in 
closets, but with a veritable court-martial for 
my predestined doom, when I should be so 
bad again. 

Our family retinue consisted of a cook of jolly 
and rubicund exterior, and a pleasant lad, who, 



122 GOOS&-QUILL PAPERS. 

among his other duties, cared for my glossy- 
coated Arabian, and led him about like a circus- 
master, while I "snatched a fearful joy" upon 
his back. The memory of the former person- 
age is embalmed in the fragrance of roast beef 
and mashed potatoes, edibles which he an- 
nounced frequently with a melodramatic flourish 
and intonation never to be forgotten. Burly 
old Bush ! He had a quaint way of delivering 
his best things, starts pede in uno y with a side- 
long light of the eye to let you into the secret 
of his rich hyperboles. 

Another favorite of mine was an adjutant, 
owner of two sociable King Charles spaniels, 
which I was permitted to endow with portions 
of my supper, and which I visited as regularly 
as a country lover his sweetheart, when the gen- 
eral evening relaxation set in. Captain J., too, 
stern, reticent, and little popular with his men, 
was strangely gentle to one that rode on his 
arm, and fell asleep, many a time, at his knee. 
He was a fascinating story-teller, and held my 
fancy longer than any soldier- playmate of his 



A CHILD IN CAMP. 123 

day. He had the absolute confidence of ray 
infallible young man. The old figure, "true as 
steel/' was made for him. They forbore to tell 
me till long afterwards, that he fell, shot through 
and through, at the Wilderness, with his face 
to the foe. 

He had a brother, a mere boy, whose sunny 
hair I can remember under the military cap. 
But him I may come across any hour, pros- 
perous and sunny-haired still. The only other 
figures plain to my mind's eye are P., the sweet- 
mannered gentleman who took care of me in a 
long railway journey ; S., the surgeon, maker of 
jokes and of whistles; W., who used to sing 
"Malbrook s'en va-t en guerre/' with immense 
satisfaction to himself, at least ; and C, an in- 
veterate patriot, who gave his good right arm 
for the asking, at touch of a cannon-ball. 

During that stay there was much gayety and 
little mishap. My elders rode off to many a 
hunt, or held tournaments with all the tilting 
and fair ladies' smiles incidental, nay, essential, 
to their success. Twice, in the midst of less 



124 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

serious things, the men were called to sleep 
under arms. I can very well remember, an- 
other time, ominous talk of Mosby and his 
guerillas, and a cloud of dust on the horizon 
which seemed to betoken his restless squad- 
ron. But these were variations on a winter full 
of pastime, and uncommonly clement and merry. 
The campaign that followed was so arduous, and 
involved such heavy losses, that it is cheering to 
remember the hearty voices of old play-fellows 
during that genial holiday, to take down the 
books they used to read from their anchorage 
on a shelf, and to treasure up the gay incidents 
that brightened their tragic story. 

I recall a waiter of exceeding blackness 
who impressed me in a Washington hotel, and a 
sandwich, uncommonly sharp with mustard, ob- 
tained on the homeward journey at the Baltimore 
station, where the city seemed to turn out to feed 
the very hungry in my person; and nothing at 
all further, beyond these unspiritual details, till 
the war drew to a close. For then my best- 
beloved soldier came home. He was terribly 



A CHILD IN CAMP. 125 

shattered with suffering and fatigue, — how irrev- 
ocably hurt I knew not. If "the stars had 
fallen from heaven to light upon his shoulders/' 
the thunderbolt had fallen tooj and the gen- 
eral's insignia was sealed with a minie-ball. 
After a series of escapes thrilling enough for a 
dime novel, after a plunge, horse and man, into 
a ravine, a solitary stampede in a swamp, the 
loss of a scabbard and a patch of clothing by the 
familiar brushing of a bomb, and a hole through 
a cap neatly made by an attentive sharp-shooter, 
the charmed bullets had hit at last. It was my 
earliest glimpse of the painful side of the war, 
when he stood worn, pale, drooping, waiting 
recognition with a weary smile, at the door of 
the sunny little house we all loved. Instantly, 
heedless of any persuasive arms or voices, I 
slipped headlong, like a startled seal from the 
rocks, and disappeared under the table. Such 
was my common mode of receiving strangers ; 
and here, indeed, was a most bewildering and 
appalling stranger. In vain my soldier called 
me by the most endearing names ; even the 



126 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

whimsical nomenclature of camp-life failed to 
convince me that this was no imposition. I shut 
my disbelieving eyes, and crouched on the carpet. 
For two long hours I did not capitulate, and 
then but warily. What was this spectre with 
whom I must not frolic, on whose shoulders I 
must not perch, whose head, bound in bandages, 
I must not handle? What was he, in place of 
my old-time comrade, blithe and boyish, and 
how could he expect to inherit the confidence 
I had given to quite another sort of person ? 
Unhallowed Dixie ! How it had cozened me 
out of what I prized most ! 

The wound that jarred upon me, I quickly 
came to consider as an admirable distinction, 
and altogether proper and desirable. I longed 
to be shot, in the interests of my native land; 
and presently, " by the foot of Pharaoh ! " so I 
was, thanks to a pistol in the hands of a mala- 
droit little neighbor. I underwent the ether- 
sponge and the knife, and my chubby cheek 
displayed with pride the reduced fac-simile of the 
parental scar. It was my day of jubilee, ere 



A CHILD IN CAMP. 127 

the cicatrice had vanished, when I might lean 
against that elder veteran's knee, and recount 
Munchausen-like tales of " our w prowess in the 
w r ar. 

I remember the shock of national loss .when 
the President was assassinated; and, after that, 
the coming and going of army-faces, — some 
strange, some familiar. It was like Virginia 
once more, to hear the band march, serenading, 
np the quiet street ; to recognize hearty voices 
at the garden gate ; to command my most duti- 
ful to " shoulder arms ! " and " right wheel ! " 
and, waking from slumber, to creep to the head 
of the stairs, and surreptitiously greet dear M. 
and B. and broad-shouldered A., as they passed 
below. 

Not only these my childish fancy saw, but 
there seemed to gather with them many, many 
others, bearing names that sometime had been 
cited in my presence from the bright annals of 
Massachusetts ; and out of their syllables I 
framed a ghostly pageant, following ever, like a 
breath of wind, close on the footsteps of their 



128 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

living peers. The dream-cohorts, too, smiled up 
at me, and swept by. "Trenmor came, the tall 
form of vanished years, his blue hosts behind 
him/" 

I went to camp several times thereafter, 
though never with my own brigade; but hav- 
ing outlived its enchantment, inasmuch as I 
were now conscious of " playing soldier w merely, 
I took a stand on my war record, and decided 
to withdraw from the militia. That was long 
ago. But the old prepossessions are immortal. 
The smell of powder is sweeter to me than Ori- 
ental lilies. I resent the doctrine of absorption 
into the restful bosom of Brahma. An it please 
you, I aspire to Mars. 

I used to love the sight of those shabby 
warriors, dolefully bewailing their forlorn con- 
dition, and mildly suggesting their eligibility to 
a bounteous dinner, who prowled, in long suc- 
cession, about our side door. I thrilled with 
indignation at their counterfeited wrongs. I 
brought them my sweetmeats, to throw a halo 
about their sober meal. Do I not take kindly 



A CHILD IN CAMP. 129 

yet to the battered coat bedizened with bright 
buttons, on the back of M., grimy vender of coal ? 
Do I not encourage the handsome charges of our 
grocer, solely because I know his antecedents, and 
can trace his limp to Ball's Bluff ? 

It was an article of belief, in my Utopian 
childhood, that a soldier could do no wrong. It 
went hard with me, in my eleventh year, to catch 
a glimpse of the silver Maltese cross, the badge 
of the impeccable Fifth Corps, on the breast of 
a scowling state prisoner, the hero " shorn of 
his beams." His arm no longer rested on a 
howitzer; he wielded a crowbar. He might 
have hallowed Libby or Andersonville with his 
passing, and now, — O Absalom ! 

The warden, the benignant warden, himself 
of the " trade of war," did he know what he 
was doing, when he assured me that the cells 
were peopled with ex-Federal knights ? Men 
have tried vainly to restore the lost complete- 
ness of the glorious statue of Melos. Even so 
with a broken faith. What it might have been 
is out of the province of diviners. 

9 



ON GRAVEYARDS. 




KINDNESS for graveyards, and a 
superadded leaning to the old, battered, 
weed-grown ones, are not incompatible 
with the cheeriest spirit. A marked distinction is 
to be drawn between the amateur and the profes- 
sional haunter of the ccemetrion, the place of 
sleep. If the pilgrimage among marbles cannot 
be an impersonal matter, pray, sweet reader, keep 
to the courts of the living. The intolerable pain 
of meeting with some clear-cut beloved name ; the 
chance of stumbling on some parody of the de- 
parted, under a glass case, or of brushing against 
the clayey sexton, fresh from his delving, — these 
are things whose risk one would not willingly 
run. Therefore stick to antiquities, and let thy 



ON GRAVEYARDS. 131 

fastidious eye look with favor at no carven mor- 
tuary date that was cut later than under the third 
of the Georges. If there be a suspicion of Scotch 
granite, or of landscape gardening in any God's 
acre as thou passest by, turn thee about to wind- 
ward. But where there stand, in honest slate, 
armorial ensigns, gaping cherubs, and cheerful 
scythes and hour-glasses, labelled (as a child 
labels his drawing, " This is a cow ") with " Me- 
mento mori, " or the scarcely less admirable tru- 
ism, " Fugit hora," then enter in, and read that 
chronicle, with its grassy margin, which the cen- 
turies have written. 

Here is the great dormitory ; here sits the little 
god Harpocrates, swinging on the lotos-leaf, his 
finger on his lips. 

" No noyse here 
But the toning of a teare. " 

Thousands possess the earth in peace. Are not 
Spurius Cassius and the Gracchi vindicated, when 
the Agrarian law prevails at last ? 

How paltry a thing is a monument to the dead, 
save as expressing the affection of survivors ! 



132 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

Cannot the liberal soil absorb, without comment, 
the vast number of lives so sadly inessential to 
the world's growth and beauty ? It must needs 
forever be placarded to the stranger, who would 
fain not be critical concerning the failings of these 
old hearts, where John Smith lies. It is not the 
chisel which keeps a memory alive. An inscrip- 
tion is superfluous for him whose deeds are graven 
in the book of life. Many another, who has but 
elbowed his way selfishly through the world, is 
laid under all the figures of rhetoric, and is be- 
holden to nothing better than an obelisk to speak 
him fair. "To be but pyramidally extant, " says 
Sir Thomas Browne, " is a fallacy in duration." 
A monument, " a stone to a bone, " shows the ter- 
minus of the corporeal journey, and serves merely 
to mark the gateway through which something 
perishable, that was dear, has passed away. 

Think of the gloomy, pessimistic habit of the 
Puritan colonists, surmounting every grave with a 
grinning skull, in tracery, when the benighted 
pagans, ages before, crushed out the material as- 
pects of death beneath chaplets of roses, amaranth, 



ON GRAVEYARDS. 133 

and myrtle ; imagery of the liberated insect, 
leaping to the sun with impetuous wings ; poesy 
full of hopefulness and cheer ; and the symbolic 
figure of an inverted torch over the burial pile ! 
It might disparage the acrid sanctity of the fore- 
fathers to ask which of the two seemed worthiest 
to inherit immortality. 

Cotton Mather, after his whimsical fashion, pro- 
nounces it as the best eulogy of Ralph Partridge, 
the first shepherd of the old Duxborough flock, 
that being distressed at home by the ecclesiasti- 
cal setters, he had no defence, neither beak nor 
claw, but flight over the ocean ; that now being 
a bird of Paradise, it may be written of him, 
that* he had the loftiness of the eagle and the in- 
nocency of the dove. His epitaph is : avolavit. 

The most exquisite epitaph I ever saw was one 
of an infant of German extraction, who died, at 
the notable age of sixteen months : " Beloved and 
respected by all who knew him." Wellnigh as 
pompous and as plausible is an obituary in favor 
of a similar lambkin, yet to be deciphered at 
Copp's Hill : " He bore a Lingering sicknesse with 



134 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

Patience, and met ye King of Terrors with a 
Smile. " One Abigail Dudley sleeps in a New 
England village under a white stone, profession- 
ally indicative "of her moral character;" a widow 
droops in effigy over a Plymouth tomb, and states 
in large capitals that she has lost "an agreeable 
companion." Near by is the harrowing script: 
" Father. Parted Below ; " and its sequel a yard's 
length off : " Mother. United Above. " It flashes 
across vour brain like a revelation of Vandal 
atrocities. 

What wondrously sweet lines old English poets 
wrote over the graves of women and children ! 
Think of Carew's " darling in an urn ; " of Ben 
Jonson's " Elizabeth ; " of u Sidney's sister, Pem- 
broke's mother ; " of Drummond's " Margaret ; 'f 
of Herrick's " On a Maid," every word precious 
as a pearl; and of the wholly startling pathos 
wherewith one now without a name bewailed his 
friend : — 

" If such goodness live 'mongst men, 
Bring me it ! I shall know then 
She is come from Heaven again." 



ON GRAVEYARDS. 135 

General Charles Lee, that sad Bevolutionary 
rogue, wrote in his last will and testament : " I do 
earnestly desire that I may not be buried in any 
church or churchyard, or within a mile of any 
Presbyterian or Anabaptist meeting-house; for 
since I have resided in this country, I have kept 
so much bad company while living that I do not 
choose to continue it when dead. " 

Of Soger Williams, who was also granted 
solitary sepulture, a strange tale is told. There 
was question, some years back, of transplanting 
him from his sequestered resting-place to a stately 
mausoleum. The diggers dug, and the beholders 
beheld — what ? Not any received version of 
that which was he, but the roots of an adjacent 
apple-tree formed into a netted oval, indented with 
punctures not wholly unlike human features ; par- 
allel branches lying perpendicularly on either side; 
fibres intertwined over a central area ; and lastly, 
two long sprouts, knotted half-way down, and ter- 
minating in a pediform excrescence wonderful to 
see. It was plain, thought the savants of P., that 
the apple-tree had eaten of ancient Eoger; now 



136 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

who had eaten of the fruit of that apple-tree? 
Verily, " to what base uses may we return ! " 

It was said of old by the English Chrysostom : 
u A man shall read a sermon, the best and most 
passionate that ever was preached, will he but 
enter into the sepulchre of kings. " Let a tour- 
ist go through Europe, from town to town, paus- 
ing in the porches of burial-grounds : shall he not 
touch the naked candor of governments and follow 
the hoary chronicle of ages backward with his 
Hebraic eye? To him, the graveyard moss that 
eats out the charactery of proud names, is a sage 
commentator on mundane fame; and the humble 
mound to which genius and virtue have lent their 
blessed association inspires him with precepts 
beyond all philosophy. For history is not a clear 
scroll, but a palimpsest; and he who is versed 
only in the autography of his contemporaries 
misses half the opportunity and half the gladness 
of life. 

The habit of providing for personal comfort 
anticipates an easy couch and a fair prospect for 
us at the end. How many men, from the royal 



ON GRAVEYARDS. 137 

warriors of yore who willed their ashes to be car- 
ried into a far-away country, have chosen, and 
jealously guarded in thought, their to-morrow's 
place of rest? A superfluous care, when the un- 
awaited waves of ocean have cradled thousands, 
and every battle-field opens to receive the staunch 
and strong ! Even for the sake of mysterious 
beauty such as hath thy holy hill, Concordia! 
alert youth itself might harbor a not ungentle 
welcoming thought of death. Yet that head 
which is confident of quiet sleep is scarce solici- 
tous of its pillow. One last assurance vibrates, 
like triumphant music, in ears impatient of much 
speech upon a text so sacred. " To live indeed," 
it echoes, " is to be again ourselves, which being 
not only a hope, but an evidence in noble believ- 
ers, it is all one to lie in St. Innocent's churchyard 
as in the sands of Egypt : ready to be anything, 
in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with 
six feet as with the moles of Adrianus. " 




SOME GARDEN-FOLK. 




HE snail is a kind-hearted, happy-go- 
lucky creature. Carrying his house 
with him, he leaves no cares at home. 
He is otium cum dignitate. He is the moral 
antipode of the ant. He shirks responsibilities, 
and turns the cold shoulder on labor and fret. 
Deliberation, calmness of intellect, consciousness 
of superiority, are in his slow, majestic tread. 
So that he gets to the place in mind, it is of no 
possible consequence how long the journey may 
be. The crystal day is all his own. He is a 
Nabob, a gentleman of leisure, and considers 
haste vulgar, and proper only to grasshoppers 
and miserable sparrows. 

Rose-bugs are impertinent. Humming-birds, 
bright and beautiful, come too seldom amongst 
our flowers of June, but the bees come instead, 



SOME GARDEN-FOLK. 139 

and burden the air with their soothing baritone. 
Yet the bees have a "way of pressing personal 
souvenirs upon you. Pray you, avoid it ! as 
Hamlet tells the players. 

Caterpillars fascinate a spectator. They are 
full of mysterious interest, berthed in their soft 
cocoons, deftly caught on to the jagged edges of 
stone walls, or bent on travelling from leaf to 
leaf, with their " many twinkling feet " in full 
motion. A caterpillar, however varied and at- 
tractive his coloring, is not a favorite with society, 
or with that branch of it which goes about in 
bonnets and high-heeled boots. Moralists, rather, 
shall befriend him, the kind little creeper, and 
treat him with that reverence which the knowl- 
edge of his coining glories inspires. 

The earth-worm is the Pariah of garden-folk. 
His appearance, primarily, is against him ; he 
looks like an intriguer, an uneasy, officious sinner, 
wriggling his crool^d way through the world. 
The " inadvertent step," which Cowper would fain 
spare him, ends too often our groundling's pere- 
grinations. He is born to be disregarded and 



140 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

abused; a child, whose protective instincts are 
yet dormant, will decimate him for the pleasure 
of seeing his posthumous remnants take up their 
separate lives, and unconcernedly disperse. Worm 
is a reputed political exile. With his greater 
cousin, the snake, he shares the popular odium 
of Erin's isle. I have heard an old fellow, mow- 
ing grass, turn about to tell an incredulous com- 
panion that if, by any chance, one could put a 
bit of Irish soil, nay, so small a thing as a sham- 
rock, under a " Yankee wurrum," that instant 
would be the death of him. 

The legend is given in that very quaint cc Lives 
of the Saints/' which Warton thinks was written 
in the twelfth century : — 

" Seyn Pateryck com thorn Goddes grace to preche in 

Irelonde, 
To teche men ther ryt believe Jehn Cryste to onder- 

stonde ; 
So fil of worms that londe he fonnd that no man in 

myghte gon, m 

In som stede for worms that he nas wenemyd anon ; 
Seyn Pateryck bade onr lord Cryste that the londe 

delyvered were 
Of thilke fonl wormis that none ne com ther ! " 




HOSPITALITIES. 

T does the heart good to read of some 
light-footed troubadour or reverend 
pilgrim trudging from gate to gate, all 
the way across a strange country, everywhere 
welcome as an expected guest, and given the 
liberty of the host's kingdom. Chroniclers give 
us pretty pictures of the household sitting about 
the dusty palmer, listening to his pious and spir- 
ited homily ; of the errant singer, wrapped in his 
worn velvet cloak, delighting young maids and 
children with the old burden of Eoncesvalles, or 
with the tale of that dreamer Eudel who crossed 
seas to find his unseen lady-love at Tripoli, and 
to die, satisfactorily, in her arms. Whether the 
master of the castle had subsequent cause to re- 
gret the shelter proffered to his birds of passage, 
posterity shall never learn. For those were the 



142 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

days of chivalry; and the brave bounty which 
accepted the wayfarers without question was able 
to overlook a deficiency, if such there were, in 
the familv silver. Of this best sort, too, was the 
hospitality of Alcinoiis to Ulysses, treating him 
like a king, and dreaming not of his hidden 
kingliness. Spanish courtesy yet keeps a show 
of heart-whole giving : " This is thy house," an 
Andalusian tells his visitor. An Indian, in his 
forest wigwam, does yet better. If he abide you 
at all, with your scalp at its accustomed altitude, 
he tenders whatsoever he calls his, and would 
scorn to conceal from you the innermost recesses 
of his savage larder. 

"Is he not hospitable," quaintly asks one 
of our American essayists, "who entertains 
thoughts ? " 

Think of the unlicensed generosity of the 
Eoberds-men, dealing out what had but just 
become theirs by right of might, and of our 
niggardly modern dispensation ! of that Duke 
of Newcastle, the lavish splendor of whose re- 
ceptions bewildered all England; or of another 



HOSPITALITIES. 143 



social peer, Edward, Earl of Derby, "in whose 
grave, since 1572/' said Thomas Fuller, "hospi- 
tality hath in a manner been laid asleep." Timon 
began as bravely as any of these. Waiving all 
formal recognition of his royal liberality, he made 
his frank exordium in the banquet-hall : — 

" My lords ! ceremony 

Was but devised at first to set a gloss 

On faint deeds, hollow welcomes, 

Recanting goodness, sorry ere 'tis shown ; 

But where there is true friendship, there needs none ; 

Pray sit . . ." 

Hospitality hath been called threefold: for 
one's family, of necessity ; for strangers, of cour- 
tesy ; for the poor, of charity. Friendship pushes 
its privilege to the broad extreme, and loses its 
sense of ownership. 

" Cot or cabin have I none, 
And sing the more that thou hast one." 

The twin playwrights of the reign of Queen 
Bess set up their tent " on the Bankside ; " 
alternately wearing "the same cloathes and 
clokes/' and having but one bench of the house 



144 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

between them, which the twain " did so much 
admire " ! 

A guest should be permitted to graze, as it 
were, in the pastures of his host's kindness, left 
even to his own devices, like a rational being, 
and handsomely neglected. Our merry friend, T., 
has been known to beat his breast and groan 
w r hile passing a certain suburban house, whose 
inmates consider themselves hfe devoted friends. 
It seems that on his last visit he found only the 
ladies of the establishment at home, — ardent, 
solicitous creatures, whose good manners were 
nearly the death of him. He had a mind to 
await their brother's return, and while the fair 
Araminta was gathering roses on the terrace, and 
her sister had momentarily vanished in-doors, our 
tender innocent, pleased with the landscape, and 
not averse to bodily comfort, incontinently got 
into the hammock. He had barely begun to 
sway to and fro, in his idle fashion, when delicate 
expostulations smote his incredulous ear. He 
learned, with respectful awe, that he was liable to 
headache, to sea-sickness, to certain and sudden 



HOSPITALITIES. 145 



thuds on the floor of the piazza, and, lastly, 
to influenza and kindred ills, by facing the for- 
midable summer atmosphere, in a recumbent 
position, without wrap or shawl. The climax 
was capped by the wheeling forward of a portly 
arm-chair, and the persuasive order to "take 
that," and be " comfortable." T. was too dazed, 
or too shy, to protest. When he sought a cool 
seat in the bay-window, down came the sash, "for 
fear of a draught ; " he made bold to caress the 
dog, and Nero was led away and chained to his 
kennel, because he was " apt to bite ; " he fell in, 
to his infinite diversion, with the junior member 
of the household, and master was marched off to 
bed, with the stern bidding to " be a good boy," 
and not "trouble the gentleman." Like sorrows 
hovered over him till the blessed hour of release. 
B. was back at seven, and wondered why his old 
classmate had gone. 

Who does not envy them that knew Henry 
Wotton, "a very great lover of his neighbors, 
a bountiful entertainer of them very often at 
his table, where his meat was choice, and his 

10 



146 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

discourse better ; " or the Bohemian spirits of 4 
Inner Temple Lane, with " the card-tables drawn 
out, the fire crackling, the long-sixes lit, the 
snuff-boxes ready for any one's handling, the 
kettle singing on the hob, glasses and bottles and 
cold viands within reach, books lying about, 
familiar guests doing what they pleased, chatting, 
reading, coming, going, — veritable At Homes, 
with a sense of slippered, almost of slip-shod 
ease " ? But hold ! are we to indite a disquisi- 
tion on the Decay of Hospitality ? Are there no 
open hearts above ground, nor any houses where 
the elected comer may still hold the key to every 
room, with no direful Blue-beard exclusions ? 
Leaving Dives to the practice or omission of a 
virtue eminently appropriate to his coffers, what 
of the very poor ? For there is a paradoxical 
extravagance in their way of life; a glorious 
communism between one that is needy and one 
whom he discovers, day on day, to be needier 
than himself. Where have they learned that 
sweet readiness of succor ? The churl, with them, 
is he who withholds his little superfluity from a 



HOSPITALITIES. 147 



more miserable brother. In the close kinship of 
suffering, their souls grow mutually pitying, mu- 
tually helpful, clinging each to the rest, as a 
coral atom is moored to the patient island, built 
from the incalculable depths of the sea. If the 
wealth that is gracious and thoughtful should 
vanish to-morrow from the earth, generous giving 
should find its home in the thin, kind hands of 
poverty ; and then, as now, should some bright- 
eyed student arise to deny the asseveration of 
history that the noble old Hospitallers are no 
more. 




THE TWO VOICES. 




OWN a tranquil country road, I walked 
in a reverie, one April Sabbath after- 
noon. I seemed to be in a strange 
land, and pictures and fancies of Maiano and 
the Tyrol were floating in my brain ; yet I was 
unconsciously moving, like a drowsy star, in the 
old, old orbit, whence I had never strayed, within 
brief distance of the spot where I was born, 
and where for years my life had worked itself into 
so dear a bondage, that the desire of journeying 
gladly elsewhere, save in the spirit, had become 
a sort of treason. The air was laden with the 
moist delicious fragrance of early spring, which 
comes as yet from nothing but the ground, 
as if the persuasive showers had stirred and 
awakened the very clods and roots and buried 



THE TWO VOICES. 149 

fragments of leaves into something like hope and 
aspiration. This is the advent-time of Nature, 
far more touching and suggestive than the immi- 
nent beauty whereof it is the fore-runner. *As I 
ventured onward, wrapped in solitary thought, 
and resolved, as it were, into the sweet indolent 
joy of riving, I stooped to pick up a branch, 
silvered with thick buds, which the wind had 
blown across my path. At that moment, dis- 
tracted from the invisible world, and in the 
transition-state between dreaming and alert at- 
tention, I was saluted with a strain of exquisite 
music, such as one can conceive of as floating ever 
in Jeremy Taylor's " blessed country, where an 
enemy never entered, and whence a friend never 
went away." I raised my head to listen, and 
immediately perceived ahead of me, back from the 
highway, and embowered in trees, a gray church 
porch, out of which were ushered the interlacing 
harmonies which had charmed my wandering ear. 
The door stood open, and no idlers were in 
sight ; no late wheel-marks were betrayed on 
the soft, fine dust of the road. Yet bv the 

J ml 



150 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

many-colored sunlight, filtered through the costly 
windows of the nave, I saw that a number of 
people were gathered together in the cool and 
quief edifice. A single glance showed me that 
the interior was of extreme beauty, and of pre- 
cisely that delicacy and airiness of design most 
unlikely to be coupled with massive granite 
walls. Yet there it was, impregnably grim with- 
out, peaceful and assuring within, like a kindly 
heroic heart beating under armor. Prom it, 
and about it, and through it, floated the siren 
voices of my search. In an illusion-loving 
mood, I sought not to pluck out the heart of 
my mystery, nor to rob it of its soft promise 
by vain questionings. I slipped into a deserted 
seat in the shadow of the choir-stairs, and gave 
myself up to this sole delight : as to prayers 
and sermons, either they were already over, or 
else they went past in the lapses of melody, as 
the swallows by the window above me, beating 
their shining way upward, utterly without my 
knowledge or furtherance. 

I heard, above the rest, and sometimes inter- 



THE TWO VOICES. 151 

twined only with each other, a brave, jubilant 
voice, and a voice steadfast and tender. Neither 
know I which was the fairer, so ministrant were 
both, so helpful and unfailing. The soft, starlit 
voice might touch an over-eager soul with calm ; 
to the soul distressed, the strong voice would 
come like a great noon-tide w 7 ind, impelling it 
towards the height where the sun dwelt, and all 
the fountains of the day. Clear as thought was 
the bright voice, striving, surmounting, and in- 
stinct with truth ; but like the first sigh of pas- 
sion was the sad voice, thrilling, too, with 
memories of yesterdays that cannot return for- 
ever; fond, sensitive, dedicated to the deep re- 
cesses of the heart, where there is search after 
hidden meanings, and mourning over the inscru- 
table laws through which not even Love's 
anointed eyes can see. I recognized the battle- 
call, the rush of the wings of the morning, the 
paean of young ambition in the victor-voice, 
whose very petition was a conquest, in the irre- 
sistible faith and strength of its asking ; but 
the loAvly voice sang with unspeakable pathos, 



15*2 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

in whose every plea the greater grief of rejec- 
tion was already apprehended. A grateful spirit 
would fain bestow on the glorious voice an ar- 
dent welcome, and on the gentle voice a lingering 
caress. Both I loved, and unto both my soul 
hearkened; for they were the voices of angels, 
and one was Joy, and one was Peace. 

Then, as in a vision, I beheld a fair prospect 
before me, and in the centre of its green beauty 
arose two hills, from whose separate summits 
the voices ruled perennially, showering blessings, 
healing sorrow, banishing care, cheering and sol- 
acing the earth. Now the weak needed not to 
rely on the strong ; and pity and protection were 
scarcely asked or given ; for music, " the most 
divine striker of the senses/' — music alone was 
the arbitress of the world. And all day, past 
twilight into the deep gloom, were the voices 
singing, not incapable of being wearied, but re- 
vivified forever by the smiles and tears of pil- 
grims who departed from the hill-top with hearts 
made whole. 

I marked that the little children were drawn 



THE TWO VOICES. 153 

frequently to the abode of the melancholy voice, 
because it was soft and weird, like a gypsy 
mother's lullaby, or the rustle of aspens in 
serene weather. Thither also came youth, nurs- 
ing its first grief with wilful indulgence, and 
manhood, yearning for summer melodies that 
should soothe all unrest, and close " tired eye- 
lids over tired eyes/' But I knew the babes 
were there only because of the sweet, curious 
affinity of childhood with sombre influences ; and 
the young palmers, through some sophistry of 
love and honor; and the strong workers, over- 
wrought, since there was no courage left for 
self-invigoration, and no guide to help them 
towards the city of the cordial voice, whither 
they should have turned. One I saw coming 
forth from the field, with a scroll under his arm, 
pale and worn with " glimpses of incomprehen- 
sibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do 
but tenderly touch," who stood a moment, rapt 
in rash delight at the voice which betokened 
tears and infinite longing and regret; and who, 
straightway remembering that the poet's mission 



154 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

is gladness,, incessant belief and prophecy of 
good, betook him, albeit with a sigh, to that 
other abiding-place, where he might learn of 
the happy voice, xill the afflicted, with wild 
and doleful steps, sought to climb the dolorous 
mountain towards the setting sun; and often a 
friend's strong hand intervened, and led them, 
rather, with inspiring speech, into the land of 
healing. I watched, time on time, soldiers march- 
ing to the wars, sustained by the glad voice, and 
hastening forwards with its spell upon them like 
a consecration ; and again, the weary troops re- 
turning, with tattered colors and broken ranks, 
pausing in the lovely courts of the grave voice, 
to chant with it a song of memory and repara- 
tion and thanksgiving. I came to understand, 
though but slowly and confusedly, that the entire 
universe was swayed by these voices ; and that, 
while each was best in its holy office, the strong 
voice was that which nerved us to our duty, 
and the kind voice that which rewarded us for 
duty done. Always within hearing of them, we 
travel towards the ampler day, loyal to one 



THE TWO VOICES. 155 

until we have merited the loving offices of the 
other j holding them sweetly correlative, even as 
are labor and repose, or life and death. 

So soon as I was filled with the glory and 
significance of the voices, they faded impercep- 
tibly away, and I heard them no longer. More- 
over, I found my lifted eye resting anew on the 
village church, where the dying light fell across 
the aisles, and the bare clematis-vine waved at 
the near window ; and whence the last worship- 
per had departed. Had I indeed been on a 
strange road, and among strange sounds ? It 
may be that even in my day-dream I might 
have called my beloved singers by their earthly 
names ; and that so I might this hour, were it 
not for a clinging scruple. For I have been 
made wiser, and know verily that both are angels, 
and that one is Joy, and one is Peace. 




SWEETHEART. 

N a mood made half of tenderness, and 
half of laughter, I begin to speak of 
her : in tenderness, since to name her 
is a joy ; and in laughter, for that I cannot for 
sheer inability keep the knowledge of her to my- 
self ; partly because she had many liegemen and 
lovers who sung of her aloud to the tell-tale 
winds before I found my way to her blessed door, 
but most of all because it would strangely savor 
of injustice to appropriate so sweet a thing as her 
favor, without sharing it with the first comer 
found worthy. Therefore this delight of mine is 
no more mine than thine, and his, and theirs, and 
ours; and who would have it otherwise? 

She dwelt of old in a tranquil vale apart from 
villages, with little society save that of the scarlet 



SWEETHEART. 157 



tanager and the periwinkle-blossom. Such visi- 
tors as entered the " piny aisles " that led into 
her presence, were those only who reverenced her 
trulv. She could not abide harshness and scorn, 
and they were always gentle ; she sat in her fra- 
grant solitude as one that broods on mysteries, 
and they, in sympathy, sat beside her, one by 
one, and spake ever after with the enthusiasm and 
the unworldliness of children. But the immacu- 
late stillness which she chose for her dwelling has 
long been assailed. Revellers came from the city 
to riot in her gardens, and to disport themselves 
in her halls. Railway trains thundered hourly 
over against her hallowed threshold. Often and 
often, in passing by, you may yet hear the sound 
of inharmonious voices, and catch a glimpse of 
her fair downcast brow, as she looks mutelv out 
upon the invaders. 

Amid this " heavy change " she is unchanged 
and unchangeable. Her pure serenity was a 
sharp rebuke to our doubting, when we first 
gathered around her, after the dread of missing 
the charm whicli had made her dear. We had 



158 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

known many of her kindred, and each of them, 
howsoever lovely, seemed coarsened and cheap- 
ened to the sensitive eye, by over-much familiar- 
ity with crowds. But our celestial lady moves 
like Penelope, amid throngs of her false suitors, 
with thoughts disentangled from their clamor, in 
forbearance and patience an( J hope and honor, 
the ineffable depths of her nature evermore un- 
jarred. Long ago, and in the beginning of our 
affection for her, we twain found her asleep in 
the flooded noonday sunshine, having at her feet 
and at her head a sombre guard of pines; and 
behind them, the vagrant " glad light green " of 
spring; and again, above their topmost pennon, 
irregular amethystine clouds, visionary mountain- 
ranges, that climbed, peak on peak, to front 

" Thee, Lincoln, on thy sovereign hill." 

We flung ourselves in the young grass, and 
delayed there, lest our footsteps should break 
that exquisite slumber ; and so awed, and so re- 
joicing, looked upon her whom we had travelled 
far to see. It was her exceeding comeliness that 



SWEETHEART. 159 



made the responsive gleam dance from eye to eye ; 
bat it was her sanctity, virginal as when the Spirit 
first breathed upon it and bade it be, that held 
our lips hushed then, our memory secure and def- 
erent ever after. Over this unforgotten glory of 
ours, Saint Francis of Assisi might have breathed 
his soft hymn of thanksgiving for " my sister, 
who is very humble, useful, precious, and chaste." 
Crime should be wary of her bright presence ; 
weariness should forget its landmarks, dreaming 
beside her ; nobleness overwrought and embittered 
should take courage, and trust the world anew, 
as by a miracle, for her sake. 

Many, many times, but especially at the break- 
ing of the frosts, w'hen sap begins to thrill in the 
naked boughs, comes the desire to approach her 
peaceful abiding-place, and learn, by moon or 
sun, what more of winsomeness or splendor one 
year hath brought her. What more can it ever 
bring? For her soul is crystalline and candid, 
and on her forehead shines perpetual youth. She 
is one of the touch-stones of our finer selves. 
Verily, with this secluded friend of friends, " in 



160 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

profanity, we are absent; in holiness, near; in 
sin, estranged ; in innocence, reconciled." Her 
history is in hearts rather than in books ; her un- 
profanable beauty is the special care of heaven ; 
and we New Englanders that love her, and some- 
times come about her, harping her praises with 
sweet extravagance, have no name for her which 
men shall recognize but that of Walden Water. 




ON THE BEAUTY OE IDLENESS. 



■;■■■.; 



[M 



DLENESS is harder to distinguish than 
the philosophers stone. Stupidity you 
can put your finger on; and so with 
sullenness, day-dreaming, or bovine lassitude. 
But idleness may link itself with any, all, or 
none of these. It is the will-o'-the-wisp among 
human characteristics. You avoid it, being hood- 
winked as to its presence in your vicinage; you 
bear with it in others, when your tolerance is 
veritably bestowed on something very different. 
Small wonder if you wax so wise and so finical 
that you shall swear, sooner or later, in the phrase 
of a certain friend of ours, that " there never 
was no sich " a thing ! 

What astronomy is to astrology, or chemistry 
to the alchemy of old times, that is idleness, so 

11 



162 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

called, the most useful and edifying spectacle in 
the world, to idleness criminal. Idleness, simon- 
pure, from which all manner of good springs like 
seed from a fallow soil, is sure to be misnamed 
and misconstrued, even when it is stuck, like a 
bill-post, in the public eye. A thinking person, 
the schoolmaster will allow you, is barely to be 
called idle ; but for that exaggeration of thought, 
the almost tidal stand-still between activities, 
which belongs to Dunce on the back bench, he 
has no more respect than can fit in the circum- 
ference of his rod. Dunce, nevertheless, may 
grow up to be called Oliver Goldsmith, or Arthur, 
Duke of Wellington. Tommy, who stops on his 
way to market, to sit on a stone wall and plan a 
nest-robbing, indulgent passers-by shall consider 
busy, though misguided ; but young Galileo or 
Columbus, planning nothing whatsoever, drifting 
into the mental hush and stillness whence aston- 
ishing ideas arise, are sure to be set up as a 
couple of intolerable wool-gatherers. A boy may 
crouch before the fire, looking through the kettle 
steam at " one far-off divine event," and be com- 



ON THE BEAUTY OF IDLENESS. 163 

plimented on his prospective value to society, 
or ironically offered a penny for the contents of 
his ridiculous head. 

Thoreau put his own case, in the illustration 
of the man who roves all day through a pine- 
forest, rejoicing in its height and shade and fra- 
grance, and is heralded far and wide as a lazy 
good-for-nought, as opposed to the sober and 
industrious citizen who betakes himself, axe in 
hand, to hew the giants down. Every township 
has its business men, but Mr. Henry Thoreau 
was, without exception, the best American idle- 
ness-man on record. He floated about in his 
dory, the breathing reflection of Nature in its 
wealth of detail, inflated with pride because he 
had not ever chosen to stand behind a counter ! 
Yet he " got his living by loving/' and may be 
suspected of having grained his name, diamond- 
like, on that window which looks out eastward 
on the Atlantic. How else was half the wisdom 
of the Orient cradled, but in the solemn Bud- 
dhist, coiled up, with his sealed eyelids, his shut 
teeth, and parted lips, contemplating nothing 



164 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

with tremendous suavity ? The secret of hand- 
some leisure is a fast secret now, indeed. The 
ancients have not transmitted it. Who can think 
of a breathless Athenian, save in the hour of 
battle, or of manly sport ? Pericles laid the 
fold of his garment, so, deliberately over his arm, 
and steadied himself against some calm assur- 
ance, " marchyng," as the old chronicler said of 
Queen Bess, " with leysure." Repose is stamped 
on every statue the Greeks left us. It is in their 
lyrics, however joyous ; in their large drama ; 
in their golden history. They did nothing in 
feverish haste. Perhaps it may not be rash to 
acknowledge that they were reasonably clever, 
and managed their terrene concerns with some 
intelligence. There is over-much stir around us : 
mountains heaving, cities building, seasons racing 
by, governments shifting and turning at the four 
corners of the earth. It is the modern miracle 
that the contemporaneous growing lilies have not 
lost their blessedness, in striving to toil and 
spin. 

Wherever a soul keeps energy in reserve, and 



ON THE BEAUTY OF IDLENESS. 165 

a little healthful languor dominant, a patch of 
Arcadia is yet to be found. 

" Oblivion here thy wisdom is, 
Thy thrift, the sleep of cares ; 
For a proud idleness like this 
Crowns all thy mean affairs ! " 

When the familiar Yankee angel, Nervous Pros- 
tration, brushes you with his wing, Arcadia 
withers away. Your holiday siesta, after that, 
is not genuine. Of idleness you cannot be con- 
scious, even as innocence is no longer itself when 
it knows its name. Therefore no week-day 
preacher need exhort you to be idle, ladies and 
gentlemen, as often as you can afford it. He 
can only cast an eye along your ranks, and dis- 
covering one or two of the elect, who shall 
remind him of boats swinging gently at their 
moorings, piously hold his tongue and go on his 
way with thanksgiving. 



DE MOSQUITONE, 




P the Bruce loved his instructive spider, 
for which history does not vouch, why 
should not the public mosquito be dear 
to desponding minds, as a yet more victorious 
exponent of the value of perseverance and a set 
purpose ? Who hath circumvented her ? She 
laughs at all dissuasion. She evades the sol- 
dier's gun, the physician's potion; the Sophi 
with his fleet cannot drive her away, nor the 
Czar impale her in any dungeon. What the 
mosquito came hitherward to do, that she does. 
The " moral runs at large/' 

It is all very well to abuse her; one gets a 
poor, childish satisfaction out of such terms of 
endearment as can be readily bestowed : un- 
fledged Tamerlane ! disturber of the sanctities of 



BE 310SQUIT0NE. 167 



night ! Satan of summer joys ! — and so on. 
What avails all that ? We have to bow our 
necks, and endure her diabolics. She is an 
evil which the Constitution cannot remedy ; and 
as we are given to understand that she does 
not speak English, no protest formulated in 
that tongue can pierce her horny and tyrannical 
heart. 

The believing soul may picture her primarily 
in some sweet, decorous frolic through the glades 
of Eden (for charity would even accord to her 
the possibility of a state of first innocence), 
frisking airily with birds-of-Paradise, and given 
wholly to honorable practices. Ah ! but what 
man is proof against violent thoughts of Father 
Noah, who, when she had already entered on 
her vein-glorious, flesh-loving, back-biting, and 
peace-disturbing career, gave her the shelter of 
his house through troublous days, and, like the 
short-sighted philanthropist that he was, cursed 
the four continents in befriending two obstrep- 
erous insects? 

I cannot consider any cosmic force more emi- 



168 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

nently practical. The poet lauds a river-bank, 
and sheds on a grove the starry fascinations of 
rhetoric; it is none other than Mosquito who 
induces you to hate and shun what you would 
fain be persuaded to consider fair. She it is 
who can make the greenest landscape odious, 
and the calm haunts of trees vociferous as if 
all Bedlam were let loose under their outspread 
arms. She is your best circumnavigator. I 
cannot picture to my wildest speculations a place 
where she is not. Nowhere is she an exile, but 
hath her native bog all over Christendom. She 
holds her cannibalistic orgies wherever human 
foot hath trodden. In that Land which, geo- 
graphically, is No Man's, methinks she prowleth 
still, looking for him. Howsoever arrant a folly 
it be to ignore so great an influence on our per- 
sonal behavior, so huge a factor in the reckoning 
of men's woes, little enough is recorded of this 
wretched anthropophaginian. Dante did weakly, 
inasmuch as she figured not as chief tormentor 
among his perpetually condemned. The cricket, 
the glow-worm, the ant, the mole, long since 



BE MO S QUIT ONE. 169 



found their bards, but no prophetic malediction 
has fallen from Parnassus on their evil-minded 
cousin. There must needs be a greater than 
Milton to pronounce her anathema. 

The immense malignity of her disposition is, 
with superlative cunning, cloaked under her bod- 
ily slenderness and aerial grace. What mon- 
strous discrepancy betwixt her and her doings ! 
By what unheard-of perverseness in the natural 
order is she framed delicately as a kind sun- 
beam, or a fragment of sea-foam? On the 
theory of physical degeneracy, we may consider 
her in the archetypal plan to have been a grim 
enormity, like Begulus's Bagrada serpent, a can- 
didate of yore for the attentions of some Jack- 
the-Giant- Killer, who, should he arise to-day, 
might prove but a clumsy blunderer in face of 
her impish agilities. 

Helpless victim that I am, I look at Mos- 
quito with unmixed awe. I harbor grotesque 
superstitions, and build up romances in her 
name. Why not metempsychosis ? This mar- 
vellous restlessness, — might it not once have 



170 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

been a human thing? What if some world- 
scourge, like Attila, were pent in these narrow 
bounds, and sent whirring through space again, 
on the old, colossal mission of annoyance ? In- 
voluntarily I scan Mosquito with no humbler 
glass than a telescope. Even to the dignity of 
a malignant planet hath she attained in mine 
unjaundiced eye. Straightway, as fear building 
on fear, mount my fancies, memories, specula- 
tions, till on their topmost pinnacle flashes the 
saying of the liberal philosophers, that the im- 
mortal principle may not be lacking in the 
" meanest thing that feels ; " and my sole, hon- 
est, overwhelming impulse is to forswear the 
pious Sunday-school hope of becoming an angel, 
that is, a winged creature, lest in any phase of 
untried being, Mosquito ! I should bear affinity 
to that which thou art. 

" Execrable shape, 

That dar'st, tho' grim and terrible, advance 
Thy miscreated front across my way ! " 

Is it not an apostrophe to thee? What fiend 
was it yesterday moved my shuddering lips to 



BE MOSQUITONE. 171 

quote that gentlest strophe over thy flattened 

corpusculum, meant, peradventure, for a kindlier 

spirit ? — 

" My sprightly neighbor ! gone before 
To that unknown and silent shore, 
Shall we not meet as heretofore 
Some summer morning ? " 

Such is the irony of revenge. 

Dread Eeminiscence ! appalling Probability ! 
disconcerting and inescapable Fact ! thou art 
the Inscrutable, the Unattainable, the Never- 
Beached, I take it, of the metaphysical circle. 
In deference to thee, I salute the hem of a mos- 
quito-net. 

In the watches of the night, my soul shall 
rejoice to behold thy wrathful eye outside. 




w 



ON THE GARRET. 

" I scorn your land, 
So far it lies below me; here I see 
How all the sacred stars do circle me." 

Henry Vaughan. 




HERE survives in certain men a climbing 
instinct, a persistence, dating from Babel 
days, which keeps them to the belief 
that they were meant to be, in Spenser's phrase, 
" neighbors to the sky." Put them down in a 
city, and they mount, by choice, as by force of 
circumstances, oil-like, over the gross mass. 
These are the garret-dwellers, disburdened, for 
the most part, of the money-bags of capitalists. 
Surely, the more a creature is denuded of riches 
and responsibilities, the lighter his spiritual weight, 
the fitter he is for nearing the unembarrassed plan- 
ets. He is no underling. His poverty literally 



ON THE GARRET. 173 



raises him up. He marches, like a conqueror 
towards some fine, deserted city, into the high 
places ; his castle is over against the morning ; 
and his bare forehead is reared above the heredi- 
tary crowns of Europe. 

That the rich should be the groundlings, after 
all, is one of the diverting sarcasms and counter- 
turns of society. Who would not, rather, stand 
play-fellow to the sun, and consider the moon's 
light nothing less familiar than a beneficent house- 
hold elf, and suffer the companionship of the rain- 
bow and of snows ? Distant and faint sounds the 
thunder of the streets ; Teufelsdrockh, and such as 
he, " sit above it, alone with the stars." Nether- 
most darkness cannot overtake the denizen of the 
garret. His matins are over and done while can- 
dles still flicker below. The wail of the Banshee 
reaches not his far-removed ear. No flood in 
civic highways appalls him; the tramp of armies, 
likewise, is beneath him, and he overlooks revolu- 
tions, undisturbed. For him, perpetually, are 
ultra-mundane joys, the choragium of the spheres, 
and the revelations of the shifting air. 



174 GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS. 

The conjurer and the astronomer alike love the 
<e high lonely tower." The painter goes thither 
for light, the student for contemplation. There, 
according to international traditions, is the Poor 
Author perennially to be found, — 

" Lulled by soft zephyrs thro' the broken pane." 

The Poor Author ! The saving leaven of lit- 
erature ! Here is his native heather, and not 
elsewhere. Here his latitude must be taken. 
If ghosts revisit their whilom kingdoms, here 
Otway, Addison, Dryden, Chatterton, Hood, 
Beranger, flock some time or other. Here you 
shall brush against the shade of Marvell, who 
dwelt thus high and thus solitary, when the 
king's deputies came with unavailing gifts in 
their hands, to buy his favor ; and presently dear 
Oliver Goldsmith shall turn his homely face upon 
you, and tell you, in his delightful voice, as he 
once blurted it out before the elegant circles at 
Sir Joshua's, how he lived happily among the 
beggars in Axe Lane ! In a garret sat Tasso, 
whimsically beseeching his cat to lend to his 



ON THE GARRET. 175 

nocturnal labors the guiding radiance of her eyes, 
having no candle whereby to write his verses. 
Dickens, who was never a Poor Author, caught, 
at least, something of his privilege in his " sky- 
nest," with the clouds and the birds shadowing his 
study windows in their passage. 

As the dwellers in the Happy Valley were daily 
entertained with tales and songs which treated of 
their own felicity therein, so we know of nothing 
more judicious than to sound the praises of the 
ever-noble garret to the Poor Author, who has 
an eternal patent on its worth and beauty. The 
least that can be said of it is that it engenders 
the philosophy of comment. Its kind soil fosters 

the spectator and the observer, in default of com- 

■ 

moner weed. The Muse, traditionally coy, can 
be caught there, if anywhere. She has been 
known to neglect her votaries in proportion to 
the fattening of their purses and their proximity 
to the first-floor drawing-room. A poet himself 
has marked it as a warning : — 

"A man must live in a garret aloof . . . 
To keep the goddess constant and glad." 



176 GOOSE-QVILL PAPERS. 

Long residence in its precincts, howbeit, may- 
tend to produce a haughty disregard of the breth- 
ren acclimated to lower levels. Your roof-perch- 
ing hermit, whose lungs are inflated with rude 
health, scoffs at the genteel ailments accruing be- 
low from the largesses of carbonic acid gas. His 
own dais-like elevation breeds arrogance in him, 
and patrician scorn ; his descent to the vantage- 
ground of the majority is palpable indeed. He 
cannot, at most, walk their paths, save, meta- 
phorically, on stilts, like the shepherds of the 
Landes. He is accustomed to live cheek-by-jowl 
with Arcturus. A kite or a balloon he acknowl- 
edges, but no terrene mail-service or horse-car. 

Valleys and cellars distress him. He cannot lie 

■ 

on the grass of a summer's day, to watch a colony 
of ants. He is of a loftier cast of mind, and 
sighs rather for the shining motes of the Milky 
Way, " scattered unregarded upon the floor of 
heaven." "We have known him to refuse a June 
cherry, plucked only amidmost of the tree. 
What is such a bigot to do, but thrust his tall 
head back, out of alien air, into his sixth-story 



ON THE GARRET. 177 

A ready where the Muse sits, waiting for him, on 
a collapsing chair? 

" Dans im grenier qu'on est bien a vingt axis ! " 

So have we sought the heights, and clove unto 
them, in orthodox privacy, though lacking our 
just deserts of the aforesaid lady's favor. Yet do 
we in nothing reproach thee, eyry of our youth ! 
with thy beloved townish outlook and undusted 
shelves, save that the tutelary pages born of thee 
are scarce of so Attic a flavor as our sense of the 
due sequence of things hath led us to desire. 




University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. 



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FIGURES OF THE PAST. From the Leaves of Old 

Journals. By Josiah Quincy (Class of 1821, Harvard 

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WHIST, OR BUMBLEPUPPY? By Pembridge. 

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NEW ENGLAND LEGENDS AND FOLK LORE. 

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IN NAZARETH TOWN: A Christmas Fantasy; 

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DONALD AND DOROTHY. By Mary Mapes Dodge. 

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■ 

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND LETTERS OF 

REV. ORVILLE DEWEY. Edited by his daughter, 

Mary E. Dewey. With a faithful likeness of Dr. Dewey. 

i2mo. Cloth. Price, $1.75 

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THE HIGH TIDE ON THE COAST OF LINCOLN- 
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THE LIFE OF SAMUEL SHARPE, Egyptologist 
and Translator of the Bible. By P. W. Clayden. 
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useful contributions to the infant science in the shape of a number of books, is a 
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and was brought into connection with some noteworthy persons. There was his 
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Chunder Sen, Miss Lucy Aiken, Alexander Dyce, Samuel Birch, besides others less 
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THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND. By Prof. J. R. 
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SEVEN SPANISH CITIES, AND THE WAY TO 

THEM. By E. E. Hale. i6mo. Cloth. Price, . $1.25 

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SONGS UNSUNG. By Lewis Morris, author of "The 

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MARY LAMB. Famous Women Series. By Anne Gil- 
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VESTIGIA. By George Fleming. One vol. i6mo. 

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" The best work that Miss Julia Constance Fletcher, who writes under the name 
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"The most brilliant novelette of the season." 

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MARGARET FULLER. Famous Women Series. By 

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It will not disappoint expectation. Mrs. Howe is of late years too infrequent in author- 
ship. She has a subject here on which she writes con amore. For her material she 
:s of conrse largely indebted to the remarkable volumes published by Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, James Freeman Clarke and William Ellery Channing many years ago; but 
Mrs. Howe gives the narrative in her own manner. She has made a brilliant and an 
interesting book. Her study of Margaret Fuller's character is thoroughly sympa- 
thetic ; her relation of her life is done in a graphic and at times a fascinating manner. 
It is the case of one woman of strong individuality depicting the points which made 
another one of the most marked characters of her day. It is always agreeable to 
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is no inartistic protrusion of her personality. The book is always readable, and the 
relation of the death-scene is thrillingly impressive." — Saturday Evening Gazette. 

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS. By Robert Louis 
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Inland Voyage," "Treasure Island," etc. With a frontis- 
piece. i6mo. Price, $1.00 

"The Silverado Squatters is the title of an exceedingly pleasant little book by 
Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, whose 'Travels with a Donkey' and c An Inland 
Boat Voyage ' had given him an enviable^ reputation as a charming and picturesque 
descriptive writer. Mr. Stevenson is an invalid, and in search of health he went to 
Mount Saint Helena, in California, and high up in its sides took possession of a 
miner's cabin fast falling to ruin, one of the few remnants of the abandoned mining 
village of Silverado. • There with his wife and a single servant considerable time was 
spent. 

The interest of the book centred in the graphic style and keen observation of the 
author. He has the power of describing places and characters with such vividness 
that you seem to have made personal acquaintance with both. . . . Mr. Steven- 
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with striking power and captivating grace." — N. Y. World. 



THE STORY OF MY HEART: My Autobiography. 

By Richard Jefferies. i6mo. Cloth. Price, . .75 

"The book is a contribution to the ideal in life. It is composed of day dreams — 
dreams which haunt an earnest mind as night follows day — a strong plea to hold 
communion with nature," says the London Academy. 

" Mr. Jefferies has won his way to the hearts of a large circle of readers by his 
charming description of 'The Gamekeeper at Home.' He now draws upon the 
rich stores of his imagination for the material that will present a unique form of 
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of that most important organ of the human frame, wherein the emotions of the 
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richness of diction and a vivid power of description that calls forth wonder and 
admiration at the skillful handling of the theme-" — Boston Journal. 



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LEAD KINDLY LIGHT. By John Henry Newman. 
With six full-page illustrative designs by Wm. St. John 
Harper, and six full-page symbolical designs by George R. 
Halm, the whole engraved by George T. Andrew. The 
illustrative designs printed in black ink, the symbolical 
designs printed in brown ink. The concluding page con- 
tains the whole hymn with its familiar musical setting as 
universally sung. Post 8vo. Beautifully bound in cloth, 
bevelled boards, gilt and gilt edge. Price, . . . $1.50 
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Tree calf and flexible morocco covers, gilt edge, . . 4.00 

Royal 8vo. Beautifully bound in cloth. Price, . . 3.00 

Antique morocco and tree calf. Price, .... 8.00 

" John Henry Newman's beautiful and spiritual hymn, one of the finest expres- 
sions of trusting faith which the hymnology of the language affords, ' Lead, Kindly 
Light," has brought comfort and strength to so man}'- hearts, that a fine and beautiful 
edition of it is sure of being most cordially welcomed. George R. Halm and 
William St. John HaqDer are the artists to whom has been entrusted the setting of 
the poem, and they have succeeded admirably. Mr. Halm has provided for each 
stanza a setting in symbolical and scroll work, while Mr. Harper has added to each 
a full-page figure-piece illustrating the spirit and meaning of the poet. The poem 
is beautifully printed, and the cuts are carefully and spiritedly engraved, making of 
the work a most beautiful and appropriate volume for Christmas use." — Bostor 
Cotcrier. 

" This beautiful hymn is entirely free from dogmatic and stereotyped phraseology 
and the literalism which defaces so many popular hymns. It is a beautiful poem 
which came from the heart of _ a deep experience, and repeats the accent of the 
universal aspirations of humanity. It is with real satisfaction that one takes up 
the exquisite little volume just published by Roberts Brothers (Boston), in which 
George R. Halm and William St. John Harper have combined their skill and g?fts 
as illustrators and George T. Andrews his fine faculty of engraving. The frontis- 
piece, ' Lead Thou me on," is the best contribution which Mr. Harper makes to 
the joint work; the other illustrations from his hand are suggestive. Mr. Halm's 
illustrations, which are printed in light brown or sepia, are notably fine. The 
symbolism which the artist employs suggest interpretations without forcing them 
upon the eye, and is pervaded by a delicate imaginative insight and beauty which 
delight one the more the longer they are looked at ; indeed, we doubt if anything 
has been done of late in the way of illustration quite so original and beautiful. 
Mr. Andrews' skill as an engraver is illustrated again in this dainty little volume, 
in which he has interpreted very clearly and satisfactorily the thought of the artists." 
— Christian Union. 

A ROUND DOZEN OF STORIES. By Susan Cool- 
idge, author of "What Katy Did," "The New-Year's 
Bargain," "A Guernsey Lily," etc. Illustrated. Square 
i6mo. Cloth, black and gold. Price, .... $1.50 



*#* Our publications are for sale by all booksellers; or will be sent 
post-paid on receipt of advertised price. 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



V 



WIND VOICES. A collection of Philip Bourke Mars- 
ton's later poems and sonnets. The author, who, it will 
be remembered, is entirely blind, ranks, according to the 
London Examiner, " alongside of Swinburne, Morris and 
Rossetti." i6mo. Price, $i»50 

"There are a number of poems in the volume which call for especial mention, yet 
they must be left to the discovery of the reader, it being sufficient to say that this 
volume is sure to advance Mr. Marston's reputation as a genuine, sweet and imagi- 
native singer." — Boston Courier* 

DIANE CORYVAL. Diane Coryval, the pretty name of 
the heroine, gives the title to a new " No Name " novel, 
a very absorbingly interesting story of French domestic 
life. i6mo. Price, $1.00 

"The incidents, although a few are uncommon and provocative of questioning, have 
the naturalness of those of actual experience. They lead to exciting situations and 
a dramatic denouement. The action in Paris is among artists, and is introductory. 
It is when the action has shifted to a country town on the coast that it develops its 
greatest effects and interest. Sea-coast scenery and farm life are described with a 
communion into their spirit and an intimacy such as only a true lover of the country 
can ever have. The occupants of the farm, two of whom are leading characters, 
have the same fondness and fidelity given to their delineation. This portion of the 
literary work, although quietly and unobtrusively, is exceedingly well done, and is 
pleasing. Diane is the principal character, and is given the real qualities of woman- 
hood ; her acts are made consistent with them, and to tend to their nobler develop- 
ment. She illustrates the undying devotion of true love. This last 'No Name' 
has higher and more even merit than any of its series. Its ground and plot are well 
chosen, while its composition and treatment are artistic. It will be widely read and 
heartily enjoyed." — Boston Globe* 

TREASURE ISLAND. A Story of Pirates and the Span- 
ish Main. By Robert Louis Stevenson. With illustra- 
tions by F. T. Merrill. i2mo. Cloth. Price, . . $1.25 

" At a time when the books of Mayne Reid, Ballantyne and Kingston are taking 
their places on the shelves to which well-thumbed volumes are relegated, it will be 
with especial delight that boy readers welcome a new writer in the literature of adven- 
ture. In ' Treasure Island,' Robert Louis Stevenson takes a new departure, and 
writes one of the jolliest, most readable, wide-awake tales of sea life that have set the 
blood tingling in the veins of the boys of at least the present generation. It is 
decidedly of the exciting order of stories, yet not of the unhealthily sensational. It 
details the stirring adventures of an English crew in their search for the immense 
treasure secreted by a pirate captain, and it certainly has not a dull page in it. Yet 
the author has contrived to keep the sympathy on the side of virtue and honesty, and 
throw upon the pirates that odium and detestation which their nefarious courses 
deserve ; and the book is one heartily to be commended to any sturdy, wholesome 
lad who is fond of the smell of the brine and the tang of sailor speech in his reading." 
— Boston Courier. 



*#* Our publications are for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent 
post-paid on receipt of advertised price. 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCH- 
YARD. By Thomas Gray. With thirty illustrations 
by Harry Fenn. Engraved by George T. Andrew. One 
vol. Post 8vo. Beautifully bound in cloth, bevelled 

boards, gilt and gilt edge. Price, $1.50 

Illuminated covers, with fringed borders. Price, . 1.75 

Flexible morocco and tree calf covers, gilt edge. Price, 4.00 
Royal 8vo. Beautifully bound in cloth, bevelled boards, 

gilt and gilt edge. Price, 3.00 

Antique morocco and tree calf. Price, .... 8.00 

m Mr. Fenn visited Stoke Pogis, the locality of the poem, and many of the illustra- 
tions are from sketches taken by him on the spot, and all of them were made 
expressly for this edition. 

An interesting feature of the Harry Fenn edition is the reproduction of three 
stanzas printed with the earlier editions, but subsequently dropped by the author. 

" The ' Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,' by Thomas Gray, which has 
long held the proud distinction of being 'the most finished poem in the English 
tongue,' is just issued by Roberts Brothers, Boston, in an exquisitely illustrated 
volume, which must hold a very high place among the handsome gift books of the 
season. The illustrations were all drawn by Harry Fenn, especially for this edition, 
many of them from sketches madeby the artist at Stoke Pogis, the scene of the 
poem. The frontispiece, an exquisite sketch of vines and flowers clustering over 
and about an old gravestone, presents a 'rejected verse,' reprinted from the earlier 
editions — averse for the rejection of which one scarcely sees any sufficient reason, 
finding it as full of tenderly pathetic music as any part of the poem — and in an 
appendix the same verse reappears, with two others, together with some note of 
the places they were originally intended to fill and the author's reasons for their 
omission. The illustrations are all designed with as truly poetic a spirit as the poem 
itself breathes, andall are presented in the very highest style of the engraver's art. 
To say that a book is a ' picture book ' is usually to imply something rather deroga- 
tory to its character for value in other respects. But not so in this case. Here the 
most delicate and appreciative art is used to interpret to the eye the exquisite poetry 
of the text. However warmly one may have supposed himself to admire the poem, 
he can hardly rise from thoughtfully looking over this edition of the ' Elegy ' with- 
out some consciously new_ and fresh appreciation of the beauty of the lines, so 
strikingly and fitly has their lofty and tender thought been interpreted to the eye. 
In all, too, that pertains to the work of the book-maker — in paper, typography, 
binding, etc. — the little volume is in thorough keeping with the art of the poet and 
the illustrator." — Chicago Times* 



THE BOY KNIGHT, Who Won his Spurs Fighting 
with King Richard of England. A Tale of the Cru- 
sades. By G. A. Henty, author of " The Young Buglers," 
"The Cornet of Horse," etc. Square i6mo. Cloth. 
Price, #1.50 



*#* Our publications are for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent 
post-paid on receipt of advertised price. 

ROBERTS BROTHERS. Boston. 



THE NO NAME NOVELS. 

"No one of the numerous series of novels, with which the country has been 
deluged of late, contains as many good volumes of fiction as the ( No Name,"' says 
Scribner^s Monthly. 

First Series. — Mercy Philbrick's Choice; Afterglow; Deir- 
dre; Hetty's Strange History; Is That All? Will Denbigh, 
Nobleman; Kismet; The Wolf at the Door; The Great 
Match; Marmorne; Mirage; A Modern Mephistopheles; 
Gemini; A Masque of Poets. 14 vols. Black and gold. 
Second Series. — Signor Monaldini's Niece; The Colonel's 
Opera Cloak; His Majesty, Myself; Mrs. Beauchamp 
Brown; Salvage; Don John; The Tsar's Window; Manu- 
ela Paredes; Baby Rue; My Wife and My Wife's Sister; 
Her Picture; Aschenbroedel. 12 vols. Green and gold. 
Third Series. — The publishers, flattered with the reception 
given to the First and Second Series of " No Name Novels," 
among which may be named several already famous in the 
annals of fiction, will continue the issue with a Third Series, 
which will retain the original features of the First and Second 
Series, but in a new style of binding. Already published: 
Her Crime; Little Sister; Barrington's Fate; A Daughter 
of the Philistines; Princess Amelie. Price per vol., . $1.00 
New Editions of Popular Poets. 

JEAN INGELOW'S POETICAL WORKS. With por- 
trait. The only complete edition, and the only edition 
published with her sanction. Household edition, with red- 
line border, gilt edges. Cloth, black and gold. Price, $1.25 
" I greatly wish that Messrs. Roberts Brothers might have the exclusive right 

to publish my books in America. I consider that enlightened nations, as well as 

individuals, ought to recognize the right of authors, both to power over and to 

property in their works." — Jean Ingelow. 

CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI'S POETICAL WORKS. 

With portrait. Household edition, with red-line border, gilt 
edges. Cloth, black and gold. Price, . . . $2.00 

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI'S POETICAL WORKS. 

With portrait. Household edition, with red-line border, gilt 
edges. Cloth, black and gold. Price, . . . $2.00 

JOAQUIN MILLER'S POETICAL WORKS. With 
portrait. Household edition, with red-line border, gilt 
edges. Cloth, black and gold. Price, . . . $2.00 

EDWIN ARNOLD'S POETICAL WORKS. (Including 

"The Light of Asia.") Household edition, with red-line ' 
border, gilt edges. Cloth, black and gold. Price, . $2.00 

JOHN KEATS' POETICAL WORKS. Lord Houghton's 
edition, with a Memoir. With portrait. Household edition, 
with red-line border, gilt edges. Cloth, black and gold. 
Price, $2.00 

* $ * Our publications are for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent 
post-paid on receipt of advertised price. 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston* 



GEORGE SAND. Famous Women Series. By Bertha 

Thomas. One volume. i6mo. Cloth. Price, . . $1.00 

"The volume before us, which is published in the series of brief biographies of 
famous women, of which we have upon previous occasions taken favorable notice, 
will give its readers a clear and generally adequate idea of George Sand's character 
and genius, and will serve to correct many misconceptions in regard to the nature of 
her writings which ignorance and prejudice have spread abroad. At the same time 
Miss Thomas has sought rather to portray the character of the famous French 
woman to whom she pays tribute than to criticise or expound the long line of novels 
which her fertile imagination produced. Her book is rather biographical than 
literary in its purpose and inspiration, and though the Sand romances are reviewed, 
and their distinctive characteristics appreciatively and intelligently described, the 
volume depends for its value and interest upon its narrative and portraiture. It is 
pleasantly, gracefully and cleverly written, and will worthily sustain the already 
high reputation of the series to which it belongs." — North American) Phila. 

"The best of the biography is that we gain from it good, definite notions of the 
early home, the convent, the marriage with M. Dudevant and how it came about, 
the short family life, and the circumstances of the early residence in Paris. Each 
change down to the last scenes of George Sand's life is characterized. So also are 
the books, which are classified and briefly described. So is that wonderful mental 
life, so flaming, so easily working itself into words and deeds, so much less removed 
in subtlety from our common life of common people than was the mental life of 
almost any other great genius. Owing to the sound and practical treatment which 
the subject receives at Miss Thomas' hands, the book is plain, readaole, adapted to 
the widest circle of readers, doing in no respect injustice to the mighty soul whose 
course Miss Thomas can trace and describe, but not as one could who had taken the 
same flights, or others as high, if not the same. The Famous Women series is a 
notable one. — Boston Courier. 



TEN TIMES ONE IS TEN. The Possible Reformation. 
By E. E. Hale. One volume. i6mo. Cloth. Price, . $1.00 

" Notwithstanding the assertion of the title-page, the Rev. E. E. Hale is *he 
author of the story under notice, and it is marked by all the well-known character- 
istics of his peculiar style. It is an account of a remarkable movement which had 
for its object the amelioration of human existence by carrying out those principles of 
a truism which Auguste Comte is credited with having formulated, but which were 
first embodied in the teachings of Christianity, and which find in the golden rule 
their tersest and highest expression. Mr. Hale is an interesting writer and a very 
sympathetic one. He possesses in unusual measure the merit of naturalness. He 
is a true realist, but instead of placing before his readers the. sins, crimes and 
weaknesses of men, he presents only those things which are honest and of good 
report. The impression made by such books as his is wholly good. _ They tend 
to make their readers better and happier and more useful in their social and civil 
relations, and we hope that 'Ten Times One is Ten' will have a wide circulation." 
— North American, Phila. 

<( Roberts Brothers have issued a new edition of 'Ten Times One is Ten,' by 
Edward Everett Hale, one of the cleverest of our writers. It is a racy little book, 
inculcating wholesome morals in an effective and almost captivating way. It is worth 
a score of the average Sunday-school books, and has a habit of getting itself read by 
whoever takes it up." — New York Star. 



*#* Our publications are for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent 
post-paid on receipt of advertised price. 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston* 



A LITTLE PILGRIM. Reprinted from Macmillan's 

Magazine. i6mo. Cloth. Red edges. Price, . ... $ .75 

< "An exquisitely writtenlittle sketch is found in that remarkable production, 'The 
Little > Pilgrim,' which is just now attracting much attention both in Europe and 
America. It is highly imaginative in its scope, representing one of the world-worn 
and weary pilgrims of our earthly sphere as entering upon the delights of heaven 
after death. The picture of heaven is drawn with the rarest delicacy and refinement, 
and is in agreeable contrast in this respect to the material sketch of this future home 
furnished in Miss Stuart Phelps's well-remembered 'Gates Ajar.' The book will be 
a balm to the heart of many readers who are in accord with the faith of its author; 
and to others its reading will afford rare pleasure from the exceeding beauty and 
affecting simplicity of its almost perfect literary style." — Saturday Evening Gazette. 

" The life beyond the grave, when the short life in this world is ended, is to many 
a source of dread — to all a mystery. _ 'A Little Pilgrim' has apparently solved it, 
and, indeed, it seems on reading this little^ book as if there were a great probability 
about it. A soft, gentle tone pervades its every sentence, and one cannot read it 
without feeling refreshed and strengthened." — The Alta California. 

THE GREAT EPICS OF MEDIEVAL GERMANY. 
An Outline of their Contents and History. By George 
Theodore Dippold, Professor at Boston University and 
Wellesley College. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.50 

Professor Francis J. Child, of Harvard College, says : " It is an excellent account 
of the chief German heroic poems of the Middle Ages, accompanied with spirited 
translations. ^ It is a book which gives both a brief and popular, and also an accurate, 
account of this important section of literature, and will be very welcome here and at 
other colleges." 

"No student of modern literature, and above all no student who aims to under* 
stand the literary development of Europe in its fullest range, can leave this rich and 
ample world of early song unexplored. To all such Professor Dippold's book will 
have the value of a trustworthy guide. ... It has all the interest of a 

chapter in the growth of the human mind into comprehension of the universe and of 
itself, and it has the pervading charm of the vast realm of poetry through which it 
moves." — Christian Union. 



MY HOUSEHOLD OF PETS. By Theophile Gautier. 
Translated from the French by Susan Coolidge. With 
illustrations by Frank Rogers. i6mo. Cloth. Price, . $1.25 

" This little book will interest lovers of animals, and the quaint style in which 
M. Gautier tells of the wisdom of his household pets will please every one. The 
translator, too, is happy in her work, for she has succeeded in rendering the text into 
English without loss of the French tone, which makes it fascinating. These houses 
hold pets consisted of white and black cats, dogs, chameleons, lizards, magpies, and 
horses, each of which has a character and story of its own. Illustrations and a pretty 
binding add to the attractions of the volume." — Worcester Spy. 

"The ease and elegance of Theophile Gautier's diction is wonderful, and the 
translator has preserved the charm of the French author with far more than the 
average fidelity. ' MyHousehold of Pets ' is a book which can be read with pleasure 
by young and old. It is a charming volume. — St. Louis Spectator. 



# * * Our publications are for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent 
post-paid on receipt of advertised price. 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



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